Trajectory Similarity Measurement: An Efficiency Perspective

Summary: Reassesses the presumed efficiency advantage of learned trajectory embeddings against direct similarity measures via complexity analysis and experiments. Finds learned methods help mainly with precomputed embeddings; direct measures win for one-off queries, while self-attention models lead learned approaches. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: 13647
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2024
Pagerank: 5.7303405e-05
Overall Rank: 6,953 | 52.30%
DOI: 10.14778/3665844.3665858

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Yanchuan Chang (University of Melbourne)
2. Egemen Tanin (University of Melbourne)
3. Gao Cong (Nanyang Technological University)
4. Christian S. Jensen (Aalborg University)
5. Jianzhong Qi (University of Melbourne)

BibTeX Citation

@article{chang_vldb24,
        title = {{Trajectory Similarity Measurement: An Efficiency Perspective}},
        author = {Chang, Yanchuan and Tanin, Egemen and Cong, Gao and Jensen, Christian S. and Qi, Jianzhong},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '24},
        volume = {17},
        number = {9},
        pages = {2293--2304},
        doi = {10.14778/3665844.3665858},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3665844.3665858},
        year = {2024}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
8,727	Quantifying Point Contributions: A Lightweight Framework for Efficient and Effective Query-Driven Trajectory Simplification	2025	VLDB	5.3766157e-05
10,249	GoodTP: An Effective Data Selection Framework for Enhancing Trajectory Similarity Learning via Monte Carlo Tree Search	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
10,801	Revisiting CNNs for Trajectory Similarity Learning	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05
10,953	SIMformer: Single-Layer Vanilla Transformer Can Learn Free-Space Trajectory Similarity	2025	VLDB	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 12 of 12 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2	R-Trees: A Dynamic Index Structure For Spatial Searching	1984	SIGMOD	0.0020210012
4	The R*-tree: An Efficient and Robust Access Method for Points and Rectangles	1990	SIGMOD	0.001157935
221	Robust and Fast Similarity Search for Moving Object Trajectories	2005	SIGMOD	0.00024224879
303	On The Marriage of Lp-norms and Edit Distance	2004	VLDB	0.00021956234
918	Trajectory Clustering: A Partition-and-Group Framework	2007	SIGMOD	0.00013215285
2,046	Distributed Trajectory Similarity Search	2017	VLDB	9.260657e-05
2,186	String Similarity Joins: An Experimental Evaluation	2014	VLDB	9.0001436e-05
2,416	DITA: Distributed In-Memory Trajectory Analytics	2018	SIGMOD	8.6068712e-05
2,467	An Efficient and Accurate Method for Evaluating Time Series Similarity	2007	SIGMOD	8.5390765e-05
5,071	Fast Subtrajectory Similarity Search in Road Networks under Weighted Edit Distance Constraints	2020	VLDB	6.3761034e-05
6,285	Trajectory Similarity Join in Spatial Networks	2017	VLDB	5.9270112e-05
6,880	Real-time Distributed Co-Movement Pattern Detection on Streaming Trajectories	2019	VLDB	5.7470112e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,316	Searching Trajectories by Locations - An Efficiency Study	2010	SIGMOD
2	6,756	On Efficiently Searching Trajectories and Archival Data for Historical Similarities	2008	VLDB
3	2,046	Distributed Trajectory Similarity Search	2017	VLDB
4	11,100	RED: Effective Trajectory Representation Learning with Comprehensive Information	2025	VLDB
5	5,112	Fast Large-Scale Trajectory Clustering	2020	VLDB
6	11,456	Efficient Non-Learning Similar Subtrajectory Search	2023	VLDB
7	5,997	Efficient and Effective Similar Subtrajectory Search with Deep Reinforcement Learning	2020	VLDB
8	3,849	Calibrating Trajectory Data for Similarity-based Analysis	2013	SIGMOD
9	10,953	SIMformer: Single-Layer Vanilla Transformer Can Learn Free-Space Trajectory Similarity	2025	VLDB
10	10,801	Revisiting CNNs for Trajectory Similarity Learning	2025	VLDB