Contrastive Pre-training of Spatial-Temporal Trajectory Embeddings

Pre-training trajectory embeddings is a fundamental and critical procedure in spatial-temporal trajectory mining, and is beneficial for a wide range of downstream tasks. The key for generating effective trajectory embeddings is to extract high-level travel semantics from trajectories, including movement patterns and travel purposes, with consideration of the trajectories' long-term spatial-temporal correlations. Despite the existing efforts, there are still major challenges in pre-training trajectory embeddings. First, commonly used generative pretext tasks are not suitable for extracting high-level semantics from trajectories. Second, existing data augmentation methods fit badly on trajectory datasets. Third, current encoder designs fail to fully incorporate long-term spatial-temporal correlations hidden in trajectories. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel Contrastive Spatial-Temporal Trajectory Embedding (CSTTE) model for learning comprehensive trajectory embeddings. CSTTE adopts the contrastive learning framework so that its pretext task is robust to noise. A specially designed data augmentation method for trajectories is coupled with the contrastive pretext task to preserve the high-level travel semantics. We also build an efficient spatial-temporal trajectory encoder to efficiently and comprehensively model the long-term spatial-temporal correlations in trajectories. Extensive experiments on two downstream tasks and three real-world datasets prove the superiority of our model compared with the existing trajectory embedding methods.