A Novel Multimodal Long-Term Trajectory Prediction Scheme for Heterogeneous User Behavior Patterns

The prediction of user trajectories is a fundamental component to support urban traffic management and various advanced transportation applications, such as traffic optimization and location-based services. Trajectory data typically contains multiple behavioral patterns and contexts, including different travel purposes, modes of transportation, time intervals, and geographic regions. These complex factors collectively influence the prediction of user trajectories. However, trajectory prediction models face challenges in effectively distinguishing between these various patterns. In this paper, we propose a novel stack Transformer-based multimodal long-term trajectory prediction (SMTTP) scheme for heterogeneous user behavior patterns. First, a learnable trajectory similarity measure method is proposed to estimate the relative distance between multi-attribute variable-length trajectories. Then, to address the instability of trajectory clustering caused by random initialization, a cluster head initialization algorithm based on high confidence nodes is developed to improve clustering stability and reduce convergence time. In addition, a Transformer-based trajectory prediction model with multi-dimensional feature fusion is proposed to achieve accurate and efficient long-term trajectory prediction. Experimental results on the real telecom dataset in Shanghai, China show that the proposed SMTTP scheme can achieve improved performance in trajectory prediction in terms of prediction error, and also has high accuracy and stability in unsupervised trajectory clustering.