From edit distance to augmented space-time-weighted edit distance: Detecting and clustering patterns of human activities in Puget Sound region

Considering and measuring the similarity of human activities remains challenging. Existing studies of similarity measures based on traditional edit distance (ED), specifically on activity patterns, do not reflect the spatiotemporal characteristics in the measurement model. Additionally, interdependence between activities is ignored in existing multidimensional sequence alignment methods. To address the gap, we initially extend the traditional edit distance to a space-time-weighted edit distance (STW-ED). Specifically, differences in distance and time between activities are considered cost functions in the operation cost calculation (insertion, deletion, and substitution). We advance STW-ED to an augmented space-time-weighted edit distance method (ASTW-ED) that integrates an optimum-trajectory-based multidimensional sequence alignment method (OT-MDSAM) with STW-ED, treating the nonspatiotemporal dimensions as augment factors. In addition, ontology is considered for the similarity measure for nonspatiotemporal dimensions.