A probabilistic map matching method for smartphone GPS data

Smartphones have the capability of recording various kinds of data from built‐in sensors such as GPS in a non‐intrusive, systematic way. In transportation studies, such as route choice modeling, the discrete sequences of GPS data need to be associated with the transportation network to generate meaningful paths. The poor quality of GPS data collected from smartphones precludes the use of state of the art map matching methods. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic map matching approach. It generates a set of potential true paths, and associates a likelihood with each of them. Both spatial (GPS coordinates) and temporal information (speed and time) is used to calculate the likelihood of the data for a specific path. Applications and analyses on real trips illustrate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Also, as an application example, a Path‐Size Logit model is estimated based on a sample of real observations. The estimation results show the viability of applying the proposed method in a real route choice modeling context.