A method for grouping trips of a mobile device, a trip including a set of trip traces from a plurality of traces collected from base stations. Each base station includes a unique station-ID. Each trace includes a station-ID and an association time indicating when the mobile device was associated with the base station. The mobile device is associated with at most one base station at any point in time. The method to group two trips by calculating an edit distance using an approximate string matching algorithm. The method includes identifying traces for the two trips, extracting ordered sets of station-IDs from the traces, calculating the edit distance between the two trips by applying the approximate string matching algorithm, to the ordered sets of station-IDs, checking if the edit distance is less than a preset edit distance threshold, and grouping the two trips into a group of trips.
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