# Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Similarity Measures: A Comprehensive Survey and Quantitative Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.05012 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05012/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Mar 2023.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Trajectory Data Management and Mining: A Survey from Deep Learning to the LLM Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.14151/) (2024)
- [Unraveling Spatio-Temporal Foundation Models via the Pipeline Lens: A Comprehensive Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01364/) (2025)
- [CausalTAD: Causal Implicit Generative Model for Debiased Online Trajectory Anomaly Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18820/) (2024)
- [UniTE: A Survey and Unified Pipeline for Pre-training Spatiotemporal Trajectory Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.12550/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Distance-Based Vessel Trajectory Clustering: Data Pre-processing, Methodologies, Applications, and Experimental Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11084/) (2024)
- [Contrast & Compress: Learning Lightweight Embeddings for Short Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02571/) (2025)
- [From Target Tracking to Targeting Track -- Part I: A Metric for Spatio-Temporal Trajectory Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15842/) (2025)
- [Capturing Context-Aware Route Choice Semantics for Trajectory Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14819/) (2025)
- [Localizing Emergent Failures in Agentic AI: Recovering Minimal Repair Families via Counterfactual Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.29228/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Spatio-temporal trajectory analytics is at the core of smart mobility solutions, which offers unprecedented information for diversified applications such as urban planning, infrastructure development, and vehicular networks. Trajectory similarity measure, which aims to evaluate the distance between two trajectories, is a fundamental functionality of trajectory analytics. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive survey that investigates all the most common and representative spatio-temporal trajectory measures. First, we provide an overview of spatio-temporal trajectory measures in terms of three hierarchical perspectives: Non-learning vs. Learning, Free Space vs. Road Network, and Standalone vs. Distributed. Next, we present an evaluation benchmark by designing five real-world transformation scenarios. Based on this benchmark, extensive experiments are conducted to study the effectiveness, robustness,nefficiency, and scalability of each measure, which offers guidelines for trajectory measure selection among multiple techniques and applications such as trajectory data mining, deep learning, and distributed processing.