Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2026, Vol. 55 ›› Issue (2): 249-260.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2026.20250284

• Spatial Artificial Intelligence and Smart Cities • Previous Articles    

A dual-threshold stay point detection method based on adaptive extended density peak clustering for sparse fixed-point trajectories

Junhao GUO1(), Mingzhi WU1(), Peixiao WANG2,3, Hengcai ZHANG2,3   

  1. 1.Academy of Digital China (Fujian), Fuzhou University, Fuzhou 350108, China
    2.State Key Laboratory of Geographic Information Science and Technology, Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China
    3.College of Resources and Environment, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China
  • Received:2025-07-14 Revised:2025-10-22 Published:2026-03-13
  • Contact: Mingzhi WU E-mail:245520020@fzu.edu.cn;Mingzhi.wu17@student.xjtlu.edu.cn
  • About author:GUO Junhao (2002—), male, postgraduate, majors in geospatial big data mining. E-mail: 245520020@fzu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    The National Key Research and Development Program of China(2023YFB3906804)

Abstract:

Stay point detection serves as a critical preliminary step in trajectory data mining, providing essential support for related research such as point-of-interest mining and movement pattern classification. However, traditional detection methods are typically designed for dense trajectories, such as GPS data, and struggle to address the challenges posed by sparse fixed-point trajectories like those from traffic checkpoints or mobile signaling data. These challenges include insufficient feature extraction and threshold estimation biases due to uneven data density and complex distribution patterns. To tackle these issues, we propose a dual-threshold stay point detection method based on adaptive expanded density peak clustering (AE-DPC) for sparse fixed-point trajectories. First, global thresholds are derived from overall data characteristics to preliminarily identify candidate stay points. Then, local thresholds are further refined based on the clustering results of AE-DPC, which constructs initial clusters by considering neighborhood relationships and improved density peaks, followed by cluster expansion and merging to enhance clustering performance. Finally, the integration of global and local thresholds enables precise stay point detection. Experiments were conducted on both open-source synthetic datasets and real-world sparse fixed-point trajectory datasets to evaluate AE-DPC and the dual-threshold method, respectively. The results demonstrate that AE-DPC significantly outperforms comparative algorithms (such as DBSCAN, HDBSCAN, and SNN-DPC) in terms of the adjusted rand index (ARI) and adjusted mutual information (AMI). Moreover, the dual-threshold method leveraging AE-DPC-based local thresholds shows superior performance in real-world stay point detection tasks, achieving improvements in precision of 14.10% and 9.88% compared to the local threshold method based on HDBSCAN and the dynamic threshold approach, respectively.

Key words: stay point detection, sparse fixed-point trajectory, clustering algorithm, density peak

CLC Number: