This paper presents several strategies that can improve neural network-based predictive methods for MOOC student course trajectory modeling, applying multiple ideas previously applied to tackle NLP (Natural Language Processing) tasks. In particular, this paper investigates LSTM networks enhanced with two forms of regularization, along with the more recently introduced Transformer architecture.
In this paper, we propose a method for semantic segmentation of pedestrian trajectories based on pedestrian behavior models, or agents. The agents model the dynamics of pedestrian movements in two-dimensional space using a linear dynamics model and common start and goal locations of trajectories. First, agent models are estimated from the trajectories obtained from image sequences. Our method is built on top of the Mixture model of Dynamic pedestrian Agents (MDA); however, the MDA's trajectory modeling and estimation are improved. Then, the trajectories are divided into semantically meaningful segments. The subsegments of a trajectory are modeled by applying a hidden Markov model using the estimated agent models. Experimental results with a real trajectory dataset show the effectiveness of the proposed method as compared to the well-known classical Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithm and also to the original MDA model.
In this paper we develop a kernel density estimation (KDE) approach to modeling and forecasting recurrent trajectories on a compact manifold. For the purposes of this paper, a trajectory is a sequence of coordinates in a phase space defined by an underlying hidden dynamical system. Our work is inspired by earlier work on the use of KDE to detect shipping anomalies using high-density, high-quality automated information system (AIS) data as well as our own earlier work in trajectory modeling. We focus specifically on the sparse, noisy trajectory reconstruction problem in which the data are (i) sparsely sampled and (ii) subject to an imperfect observer that introduces noise. Under certain regularity assumptions, we show that the constructed estimator minimizes a specific energy function defined over the trajectory as the number of samples obtained grows.
Developing safe human-robot interaction systems is a necessary step towards the widespread integration of autonomous agents in society. A key component of such systems is the ability to reason about the many potential futures (e.g. trajectories) of other agents in the scene. Towards this end, we present the Trajectron, a graph-structured model that predicts many potential future trajectories of multiple agents simultaneously in both highly dynamic and multimodal scenarios (i.e. where the number of agents in the scene is time-varying and there are many possible highly-distinct futures for each agent). It combines tools from recurrent sequence modeling and variational deep generative modeling to produce a distribution of future trajectories for each agent in a scene. We demonstrate the performance of our model on several datasets, obtaining state-of-the-art results on standard trajectory prediction metrics as well as introducing a new metric for comparing models that output distributions.