Analysing trajectory similarity and improving graph dilation

Abstract

In this thesis, we focus on two topics in computational geometry. The first topic is analysing trajectory similarity. A trajectory tracks the movement of an object over time. A common way to analyse trajectories is by finding similarities. The Fr\'echet distance is a similarity measure that has gained popularity in the theory community, since it takes the continuity of the curves into account. One way to analyse trajectories using the Fr\'echet distance is to cluster trajectories into groups of similar trajectories. For vehicle trajectories, another way to analyse trajectories is to compute the path on the underlying road network that best represents the trajectory. The second topic is improving graph dilation. Dilation measures the quality of a network in applications such as transportation and communication networks. Spanners are low dilation graphs with not too many edges. Most of the literature on spanners focuses on building the graph from scratch. We instead focus on adding edges to improve the dilation of an existing graph.