A Hybrid Rule-Based and Data-Driven Approach to Illegal Transshipment Identification with Interpretable Behavior Features

Illegal transshipment of maritime ships is usually closely related to illegal activities such as smuggling, human trafficking, piracy plunder, and illegal fishing. Intelligent identification of illegal transshipment has become an important technical means to ensure the safety of maritime transport. However, due to different geographical environments, legal policies and regulatory requirements in each sea area, there are differences in the movement characteristics and geographical distribution of illegal transshipment behavior in different time and space. Moreover, in areas with dense traffic flow, normal navigation behavior can easily be identified as illegal transshipment, resulting in a high rate of misidentification. This paper proposes a hybrid rule-based and data-driven approach to solve the problem of missing identification in fixed threshold methods and introduces a traffic density feature to reduce the misidentification rate in dense traffic areas. The method is both interpretable and adaptable through unsupervised clustering to get suitable threshold distribution combination for regulatory sea areas. The evaluation results in two different sea areas show that the proposed method is applicable. Compared with other widely used identification methods, this method identifies more illegal transshipment events, which are highly suspicious, and gives warning much earlier. The proposed method can even filter out misidentification events from compared methods’ results, which account for more than half of the total number.