STREAM: Hierarchical Dynamic Traffic Pattern Inference for Sparse Trajectory Recovery

Trajectory data are crucial in intelligent transportation management, road network optimization, and urban mobility analysis. Many downstream applications, such as trajectory prediction and travel time estimation, rely on high-resolution trajectory data. However, real-world trajectories are often sparse due to GPS signal loss and power constraints. Existing trajectory recovery methods often struggle to utilize the latent hierarchical traffic conditions, and they often overlook complex movement semantics. To address these limitations, we propose sparse trajectory recovery with hierarchical dynamic traffic pattern inference (STREAM), a unified framework that collectively infers latent global and local traffic conditions from observed trajectories. By modeling these multi-scale dependencies in its encoder, STREAM enables the decoder to accurately reconstruct missing trajectory points. Additionally, our model effectively captures multi-step movement patterns to enhance the accuracy of next-location inference. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate that our model outperforms nine existing competitors with an average improvement of 42.52% in trajectory recovery.