54,176 research outputs found
Geo-Spotting: Mining Online Location-based Services for Optimal Retail Store Placement
The problem of identifying the optimal location for a new retail store has
been the focus of past research, especially in the field of land economy, due
to its importance in the success of a business. Traditional approaches to the
problem have factored in demographics, revenue and aggregated human flow
statistics from nearby or remote areas. However, the acquisition of relevant
data is usually expensive. With the growth of location-based social networks,
fine grained data describing user mobility and popularity of places has
recently become attainable.
In this paper we study the predictive power of various machine learning
features on the popularity of retail stores in the city through the use of a
dataset collected from Foursquare in New York. The features we mine are based
on two general signals: geographic, where features are formulated according to
the types and density of nearby places, and user mobility, which includes
transitions between venues or the incoming flow of mobile users from distant
areas. Our evaluation suggests that the best performing features are common
across the three different commercial chains considered in the analysis,
although variations may exist too, as explained by heterogeneities in the way
retail facilities attract users. We also show that performance improves
significantly when combining multiple features in supervised learning
algorithms, suggesting that the retail success of a business may depend on
multiple factors.Comment: Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on
Knowledge discovery and data mining, Chicago, 2013, Pages 793-80
Analysing Human Mobility Patterns of Hiking Activities through Complex Network Theory
The exploitation of high volume of geolocalized data from social sport
tracking applications of outdoor activities can be useful for natural resource
planning and to understand the human mobility patterns during leisure
activities. This geolocalized data represents the selection of hike activities
according to subjective and objective factors such as personal goals, personal
abilities, trail conditions or weather conditions. In our approach, human
mobility patterns are analysed from trajectories which are generated by hikers.
We propose the generation of the trail network identifying special points in
the overlap of trajectories. Trail crossings and trailheads define our network
and shape topological features. We analyse the trail network of Balearic
Islands, as a case of study, using complex weighted network theory. The
analysis is divided into the four seasons of the year to observe the impact of
weather conditions on the network topology. The number of visited places does
not decrease despite the large difference in the number of samples of the two
seasons with larger and lower activity. It is in summer season where it is
produced the most significant variation in the frequency and localization of
activities from inland regions to coastal areas. Finally, we compare our model
with other related studies where the network possesses a different purpose. One
finding of our approach is the detection of regions with relevant importance
where landscape interventions can be applied in function of the communities.Comment: 20 pages, 9 figures, accepte
Location Prediction: Communities Speak Louder than Friends
Humans are social animals, they interact with different communities of
friends to conduct different activities. The literature shows that human
mobility is constrained by their social relations. In this paper, we
investigate the social impact of a person's communities on his mobility,
instead of all friends from his online social networks. This study can be
particularly useful, as certain social behaviors are influenced by specific
communities but not all friends. To achieve our goal, we first develop a
measure to characterize a person's social diversity, which we term `community
entropy'. Through analysis of two real-life datasets, we demonstrate that a
person's mobility is influenced only by a small fraction of his communities and
the influence depends on the social contexts of the communities. We then
exploit machine learning techniques to predict users' future movement based on
their communities' information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the
prediction's effectiveness.Comment: ACM Conference on Online Social Networks 2015, COSN 201
Mixture model with multiple allocations for clustering spatially correlated observations in the analysis of ChIP-Seq data
Model-based clustering is a technique widely used to group a collection of
units into mutually exclusive groups. There are, however, situations in which
an observation could in principle belong to more than one cluster. In the
context of Next-Generation Sequencing (NGS) experiments, for example, the
signal observed in the data might be produced by two (or more) different
biological processes operating together and a gene could participate in both
(or all) of them. We propose a novel approach to cluster NGS discrete data,
coming from a ChIP-Seq experiment, with a mixture model, allowing each unit to
belong potentially to more than one group: these multiple allocation clusters
can be flexibly defined via a function combining the features of the original
groups without introducing new parameters. The formulation naturally gives rise
to a `zero-inflation group' in which values close to zero can be allocated,
acting as a correction for the abundance of zeros that manifest in this type of
data. We take into account the spatial dependency between observations, which
is described through a latent Conditional Auto-Regressive process that can
reflect different dependency patterns. We assess the performance of our model
within a simulation environment and then we apply it to ChIP-seq real data.Comment: 25 pages; 3 tables, 6 figure
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