GeoSplit: Selective Edge–Server Map Acquisition for Cross-User Travel-Mode Recognition

Abstract

Networked mobility sensing couples local trajectory inference with remote geospatial context, making communication decisions part of the prediction system. We present GeoSplit, an edge–server framework for travel-mode recognition that separates the utility of map evidence, its training-time transfer, and its selective acquisition at runtime. On GeoLife with 10% labels, we evaluate these components under user-day and user-disjoint grouping. For unseen users, aligned full-map context raises macro-F1 from 0.7154 to 0.7864, while map-informed distillation yields a motion-only student at 0.7225. Through a compact query interface, entropy gating achieves 0.7729 macro-F1 versus 0.7738 for all queries, querying 39.5% of trajectories and reducing application payload by 60.5%. Under user-day grouping, selective and all-query scores are similarly close at a 21.6% query rate. Learned value estimation and probability fusion offer no consistent improvement. These results illustrate communication-efficient edge–server inference for an intelligent transportation sensing task.