Patent ID: 7487017

Claim:
A method for automatically generating pattern keys for use by an automated navigation system to provide navigational assistance, the method comprising: obtaining route information regarding routes traveled by a user, wherein route information for a given route comprises a starting location, a destination location and one or more decision point locations along the route from the starting location to the destination location; using the obtained route information to build an adaptive neural network in which the routes traveled by the user are represented in the neural network with corresponding starting and destination locations and one or more decision point locations between the starting and destination locations, wherein the decision point locations have associated weights that are adaptively learned using the obtained route information to represent user travel patterns; traversing the adaptive neural network to identify one or more predictable routes, wherein a predictable route is identified as a route through the adaptive neural network in which beginning from a starting location of the route, a destination location can be predicted with a probability that exceeds a threshold value, based on the weights associated with a subset of one or more decision point locations in a beginning portion of the route following the starting location; generating a pattern key for each identified predictable route, which comprises the destination location and the subset of one or more decision point locations sufficient to determine that the probability exceeds the threshold value with the remaining decision points in the sequence being omitted from the pattern key; and storing the pattern keys.