ACADEMIA Letters

A Point-Based Ship Route Prediction Algorithm based on

Multiclass Classification
Angelica Lo Duca, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR)

Introduction
Applications for maritime surveillance exploit the AIS technology (International Convention
for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), 2002) to build decision support systems to monitor
and predict ship routes (Cazzanti, 2015). AIS is a near real- time self-reporting messaging
system, used to exchange navigational information between suitably equipped vessels and
shore stations. AIS messages contain information about ship status (position, course, speed)
and ship details (ship number, also called MMSI and ship name). The Area of Interest (AoI)
to be monitored can be thought as a matrix, where each cell is identified by a pair containing
the row and the column in the matrix. Each ship within the AoI at a given time is represented
by a status, which can be characterized by different features extracted from AIS, such as the
current latitude, longitude, speed and heading of a ship.
Historical AIS data can be used to perform Ship Route Prediction (SRP). All the ap-
proaches for SRP rely on a probabilistic analysis, which tries to predict ship routes on the
basis of past available data. Algorithms for SRP can be classified in three categories: (1)
points-based, which predict only the immediately next position of the ship; (2) trajectory-
based, which predict the whole trajectory; and (3) hybrid-based, which combine the previous
two categories. A complete survey of SRP algorithms can be found in Cazzanti and Pallotta
(2015).

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Angelica Lo Duca, angelica.loduca@iit.cnr.it

Citation: Lo Duca, A. (2021). A Point-Based Ship Route Prediction Algorithm based on Multiclass
Classification. Academia Letters, Article 1926. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1926.

1
The OSIRIS project
Within the Optical/SAR data and system integration for rush identification of ship models
(OSIRIS) project (Reggiannini et al., 2019), we implemented a SRP algorithm (Lo Duca,
2020). OSIRIS considered the area around the island of Malta as AoI, in order to extract the
behavior of the ships contained in it. This monitoring is done through the periodic capture
of satellite images in the AoI. Because of the high cost of high-resolution satellite images,
in the first instance only low-resolution images are captured. These images, which are less
expensive, are processed by two modules, identification and classification, in order to extract
the ships present in the area and their general status. Then, the extracted status is sent as input
to the SRP system, which identifies the position of the ship after a certain time interval (e.g. 60
minutes). The position extracted from the SRP system is used to direct the satellite to capture
a new image, exactly in the area where the ship is predicted to be found. The new captured
image will be more fine-grained so more information could be extracted.

SRP
Given the current status of a ship, the problem of SRP can be thought of as a multiclass clas-
sification (MC) problem, where every class corresponds to a cell of the matrix. We tested
different MC algorithms to perform SRP, including Naive Bayes, K-Nearest Neighbors, Deci-
sion Trees, Linear Algorithms and Extension from Binary. Every MC algorithm was trained
and tested with actual data contained into a historical database of past routes, extracted from
AIS messages sent by other ships around the island of Malta. The K-Nearest Neighbors and
Decision Tree algorithms outperformed all the other MC algorithms.
The SRP classifier is composed of three phases, namely, setup, which builds a data set ex-
tracted from historical AIS data; training, which stores the training statuses and the cells of the
matrix where the ship effectively was after 60 minutes. This phase also tests the performance
of the trained model through a test set; runtime, which, given the status of a ship, assigns to
each cell of the matrix the probability of finding the ship in that cell after 60 minutes.
Table 1 shows the performance of the tested algorithms in terms of precision and recall.
Both precision and recall are measured at a macro and micro level, as it is done for multiclass
classification. It is interesting to note how Decision Tree and K-NN outperform all the other
algorithms.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Angelica Lo Duca, angelica.loduca@iit.cnr.it

Citation: Lo Duca, A. (2021). A Point-Based Ship Route Prediction Algorithm based on Multiclass
Classification. Academia Letters, Article 1926. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1926.

2
Conclusions and Future Work
In this paper we have summarized results described in (Lo Duca, 2020). Precision and Recall
demonstrated that K-NN and Decision Tree outperformed all the other algorithms.
The implemented SRP algorithms could be improved in different ways, including feature
selection, increasing the size of the dataset, and, finally, the choice of the model. Regarding
the feature selection, the training set could be extended by evaluating the correlation among
the input features. Different techniques could be used, such as Information Gain (IG), Chi-
Square (CS), Best First Search (BFS), Linear Forward Selection (LFS) and Greedy Step Wise
Search.
Another aspect may involve the choice of the model, including neural networks and deep
learning.

References
International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS), Chapter V: Safety of Navi-
gation, Regulation 19, 13 December 2002.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Angelica Lo Duca, angelica.loduca@iit.cnr.it

Citation: Lo Duca, A. (2021). A Point-Based Ship Route Prediction Algorithm based on Multiclass
Classification. Academia Letters, Article 1926. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1926.

3
L. Cazzanti and G. Pallotta, Mining maritime vessel traffic: Promises, challenges, techniques,
OCEANS 2015 - Genova, Genoa, 2015, pp. 1-6.

Reggiannini, M., Righi, M., Tampucci, M., Lo Duca, A., Bacciu, C., Bedini, L., D’Errico,
A., Di Paola, C., Marchetti, A., Martinelli, M. and Mercurio, C. (2019), “Remote sensing
for Maritime prompt monitoring”, Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, Vol. 7 No.
7, p. 202.

Lo Duca, A. and Marchetti, A. (2020), “Exploiting multiclass classification algorithms for the
prediction of ship routes: a study in the area of Malta”, Journal of Systems and Information
Technology, Vol. 12 No. 3, pp. 289-307.

Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0

Corresponding Author: Angelica Lo Duca, angelica.loduca@iit.cnr.it

Citation: Lo Duca, A. (2021). A Point-Based Ship Route Prediction Algorithm based on Multiclass
Classification. Academia Letters, Article 1926. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1926.