Informed sampling and recommendation of cycling routes: leveraging crowd-sourced trajectories with weighted-latent Dirichlet allocation

Attractive cycling routes can effectively promote active mobility, thus reducing the twin pressures of the population boom and the greenhouse effect. However, the existing approaches for cycling route recommendation primarily concentrate on identifying the most efficient routes while ignoring the urban spatial context, which is essential to meet the user’s particular preferences. This article proposes a novel method for informed sampling and recommending cycling routes leveraging crowd-sourced trajectories with weighted-latent Dirichlet allocation (WLDA). Precisely, spatial context mapping, incorporating a weighting mechanism into LDA, latent topics mining, and cycling route recommendation based on informed sampling are introduced. We collected 1,016 cycling trajectories around Cologne, Germany, for experimental analysis. The experimental results show that the three latent topics within the trajectories, leisure, city, and green tours, are clearly presented in the line density analysis. The insightful recommendation for unfamiliar cyclists could also be actively sampled upon the WLDA model. These findings suggest that our approach could shift the route recommendation paradigm from GIS analysis to a semantic mining perspective, yielding highly interpretable results and offering novel research avenues for applying machine learning in route planning.