Inferring Travel Modes from Cellular Signaling Data Based on the Gated Recurrent Unit Neural Network

Cellular signaling data have become increasingly indispensable in analyzing residents’ travel characteristic. Especially with the enhancement of positioning quality in 4G-LTE and 5G wireless communication systems, it is expected that the identification accuracy of fine-grained travel modes will achieve an optimal level. However, due to data privacy issues, the empirical evaluation of the performance of different identification methods is not yet sufficient. This paper builds a travel mode identification model that utilizes the gated recurrent unit (GRU) neural network. With 24 features as input, this method can identify four traffic modes, including walking, bicycle, car, and bus. Moreover, in cooperation with the operator, we organized an experiment collecting cellular signaling data, as well as the corresponding GPS data. Using the collected dataset as ground-truth data, the performance of the method presented in this paper and other popular methods is verified and compared. The results indicate that the GRU-based method has a better performance, with a precision, recall, and F score of 90.5%. Taking F score as an example, the outcome of the GRU-based method is about 6% to 7% higher than methods based on other machine learning algorithms. Considering the identification accuracy and model training time comprehensively, the method suggested in this paper outperforms the other three deep learning-based methods, namely, recurrent neural network (RNN), long short-term memory network (LSTM), and bidirectional long short-term memory network (Bi-LSTM). This study may provide some insights for the application and development of cellular signaling-based travel information collection technology for residents in the future.