2,520 research outputs found
Hoodsquare: Modeling and Recommending Neighborhoods in Location-based Social Networks
Information garnered from activity on location-based social networks can be
harnessed to characterize urban spaces and organize them into neighborhoods. In
this work, we adopt a data-driven approach to the identification and modeling
of urban neighborhoods using location-based social networks. We represent
geographic points in the city using spatio-temporal information about
Foursquare user check-ins and semantic information about places, with the goal
of developing features to input into a novel neighborhood detection algorithm.
The algorithm first employs a similarity metric that assesses the homogeneity
of a geographic area, and then with a simple mechanism of geographic
navigation, it detects the boundaries of a city's neighborhoods. The models and
algorithms devised are subsequently integrated into a publicly available,
map-based tool named Hoodsquare that allows users to explore activities and
neighborhoods in cities around the world.
Finally, we evaluate Hoodsquare in the context of a recommendation
application where user profiles are matched to urban neighborhoods. By
comparing with a number of baselines, we demonstrate how Hoodsquare can be used
to accurately predict the home neighborhood of Twitter users. We also show that
we are able to suggest neighborhoods geographically constrained in size, a
desirable property in mobile recommendation scenarios for which geographical
precision is key.Comment: ASE/IEEE SocialCom 201
Exploring the potential of volunteered geographic information for modeling spatio-temporal characteristics of urban population: a case study for Lisbon Metro using foursquare check-in data
In recent years we have observed an incredible increase in location-specific information provided voluntarily by individuals and disseminated via the internet. The emergence of this Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) as Goodchild first described it in 2007 has attracted considerable interest within the GIScience research community. As a special type of user generated content, it offers great potential to produce up-to-date and near real-time information related to any place on Earth, even though overall accuracy remains an issue of debate. Location sharing services (LSS) such as ‘foursquare’, ‘Gowalla’, and ‘Facebook Places’ collect hundreds of millions of user-driven footprints or ‘check-ins’. Those footprints provide a unique opportunity to study social and temporal characteristics of how people use these services and model patterns of human mobility. However, the amount and frequency of VGI is not evenly distributed and recent research considers it directly related to socioeconomic characteristics of its contributors (i.e.,geographic and economic constraints, individual social status) . Particularly in the context of population dynamics studies, VGI may provide a data source that is more accessible and current as well as less expensive and timeconsuming than traditional activity survey data. VGI generated on micro-blogging services and location-based social networks (LBSN) bear the greatest resemblance to the activity diary that time geographers are familiar with . Noulas et al. present a large-scale study of user behavior on the LBSN platform ‘foursquare’, analyzing user check-in dynamics and demonstrating how that reveals meaningful spatio-temporal patterns and offers the opportunity to study both user mobility and characteristics of urban spaces. In this study we compare functionally categorized location-specific foursquare check-in information picturing one working week in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area to a daytime working population surface produced in previous work. The objective is to analyze potential correlation patterns and explore options for modeling finescale spatio-temporal characteristics of urban land use based on VGI.Peer Reviewe
Joint Geographical and Temporal Modeling based on Matrix Factorization for Point-of-Interest Recommendation
With the popularity of Location-based Social Networks, Point-of-Interest
(POI) recommendation has become an important task, which learns the users'
preferences and mobility patterns to recommend POIs. Previous studies show that
incorporating contextual information such as geographical and temporal
influences is necessary to improve POI recommendation by addressing the data
sparsity problem. However, existing methods model the geographical influence
based on the physical distance between POIs and users, while ignoring the
temporal characteristics of such geographical influences. In this paper, we
perform a study on the user mobility patterns where we find out that users'
check-ins happen around several centers depending on their current temporal
state. Next, we propose a spatio-temporal activity-centers algorithm to model
users' behavior more accurately. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of
our proposed contextual model by incorporating it into the matrix factorization
model under two different settings: i) static and ii) temporal. To show the
effectiveness of our proposed method, which we refer to as STACP, we conduct
experiments on two well-known real-world datasets acquired from Gowalla and
Foursquare LBSNs. Experimental results show that the STACP model achieves a
statistically significant performance improvement, compared to the
state-of-the-art techniques. Also, we demonstrate the effectiveness of
capturing geographical and temporal information for modeling users' activity
centers and the importance of modeling them jointly.Comment: To be appear in ECIR 202
Exploring Student Check-In Behavior for Improved Point-of-Interest Prediction
With the availability of vast amounts of user visitation history on
location-based social networks (LBSN), the problem of Point-of-Interest (POI)
prediction has been extensively studied. However, much of the research has been
conducted solely on voluntary checkin datasets collected from social apps such
as Foursquare or Yelp. While these data contain rich information about
recreational activities (e.g., restaurants, nightlife, and entertainment),
information about more prosaic aspects of people's lives is sparse. This not
only limits our understanding of users' daily routines, but more importantly
the modeling assumptions developed based on characteristics of recreation-based
data may not be suitable for richer check-in data. In this work, we present an
analysis of education "check-in" data using WiFi access logs collected at
Purdue University. We propose a heterogeneous graph-based method to encode the
correlations between users, POIs, and activities, and then jointly learn
embeddings for the vertices. We evaluate our method compared to previous
state-of-the-art POI prediction methods, and show that the assumptions made by
previous methods significantly degrade performance on our data with dense(r)
activity signals. We also show how our learned embeddings could be used to
identify similar students (e.g., for friend suggestions).Comment: published in KDD'1
Multivariate Spatiotemporal Hawkes Processes and Network Reconstruction
There is often latent network structure in spatial and temporal data and the
tools of network analysis can yield fascinating insights into such data. In
this paper, we develop a nonparametric method for network reconstruction from
spatiotemporal data sets using multivariate Hawkes processes. In contrast to
prior work on network reconstruction with point-process models, which has often
focused on exclusively temporal information, our approach uses both temporal
and spatial information and does not assume a specific parametric form of
network dynamics. This leads to an effective way of recovering an underlying
network. We illustrate our approach using both synthetic networks and networks
constructed from real-world data sets (a location-based social media network, a
narrative of crime events, and violent gang crimes). Our results demonstrate
that, in comparison to using only temporal data, our spatiotemporal approach
yields improved network reconstruction, providing a basis for meaningful
subsequent analysis --- such as community structure and motif analysis --- of
the reconstructed networks
Hierarchical Transformer with Spatio-Temporal Context Aggregation for Next Point-of-Interest Recommendation
Next point-of-interest (POI) recommendation is a critical task in
location-based social networks, yet remains challenging due to a high degree of
variation and personalization exhibited in user movements. In this work, we
explore the latent hierarchical structure composed of multi-granularity
short-term structural patterns in user check-in sequences. We propose a
Spatio-Temporal context AggRegated Hierarchical Transformer (STAR-HiT) for next
POI recommendation, which employs stacked hierarchical encoders to recursively
encode the spatio-temporal context and explicitly locate subsequences of
different granularities. More specifically, in each encoder, the global
attention layer captures the spatio-temporal context of the sequence, while the
local attention layer performed within each subsequence enhances subsequence
modeling using the local context. The sequence partition layer infers positions
and lengths of subsequences from the global context adaptively, such that
semantics in subsequences can be well preserved. Finally, the subsequence
aggregation layer fuses representations within each subsequence to form the
corresponding subsequence representation, thereby generating a new sequence of
higher-level granularity. The stacking of encoders captures the latent
hierarchical structure of the check-in sequence, which is used to predict the
next visiting POI. Extensive experiments on three public datasets demonstrate
that the proposed model achieves superior performance whilst providing
explanations for recommendations. Codes are available at
https://github.com/JennyXieJiayi/STAR-HiT
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