Automatic Identification of Driving Maneuver Patterns using a Robust Hidden Semi-Markov Models

Abstract

There is an increase in interest to model driving maneuver patterns via the automatic unsupervised clustering of naturalistic sequential kinematic driving data The patterns learned are often used in transportation research areas such as eco-driving road safety and intelligent vehicles One such model capable of modeling these patterns is the Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Semi-Markov Model HDP-HSMM as it is often used to estimate data segmentation state duration and transition probabilities While this model is a powerful tool for automatically clustering observed sequential data the existing HDP-HSMM estimation suffers from an inherent tendency to overestimate the number of states This can result in poor estimation which can potentially impact impact transportation research through incorrect inference of driving patterns In this paper a new robust HDP-HSMM rHDP-HSMM method is proposed to reduce the number of redundant states and improve the consistency of the model s estimation Both a simulation study and a case study using naturalistic driving data are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed rHDP-HSMM in identifying and inference of driving maneuver patterns