Comparison of different driving style analysis approaches based on trip segmentation over GPS information

Over one billion cars interact with each other on the road every day. Each driver has his own driving style, which could impact safety, fuel economy and road congestion. Knowledge about the driving style of the driver could be used to encourage 'better' driving behaviour through immediate feedback while driving, or by scaling auto insurance rates based on the aggressiveness of the driving style. In this work we report on our study of driving behaviour profiling based on unsupervised data mining methods. The main goal is to detect the different driving behaviours, and thus to cluster drivers with similar behaviour. This paves the way to new business models related to the driving sector, such as Pay-How-You-Drive insurance policies and car rentals. Driver behavioral characteristics are studied by collecting information from GPS sensors on the cars and by applying three different analysis approaches (DP-means, Hidden Markov Models, and Behavioural Topic Extraction) to the contextual scene detection problems on car trips, in order to detect different behaviour along each trip. Subsequently, drivers are clustered in similar profiles based on that and the results are compared with a human-defined groundtruth on drivers classification. The proposed framework is tested on a real dataset containing sampled car signals. While the different approaches show relevant differences in trip segment classification, the coherence of the final driver clustering results is surprisingly high.