Co-occurrence prediction in a large location-based social network

  • Authors:
  • Rong-Hua Li;Jianquan Liu;Jeffrey Xu Yu;Hanxiong Chen;Hiroyuki Kitagawa

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of System Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;Faculty of Engineering, Information and systems, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan 305-8577 and Cloud System Research Laboratories, NEC Corporation, Tokyo, Japan 108-8001;Department of System Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China;Faculty of Engineering, Information and systems, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan 305-8577;Faculty of Engineering, Information and systems, University of Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan 305-8577

  • Venue:
  • Frontiers of Computer Science: Selected Publications from Chinese Universities
  • Year:
  • 2013

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Location-based social network (LBSN) is at the forefront of emerging trends in social network services (SNS) since the users in LBSN are allowed to "check-in" the places (locations) when they visit them. The accurate geographical and temporal information of these check-in actions are provided by the end-user GPS-enabled mobile devices, and recorded by the LBSN system. In this paper, we analyze and mine a big LBSN data, Gowalla, collected by us. First, we investigate the relationship between the spatio-temporal co-occurrences and social ties, and the results show that the co-occurrences are strongly correlative with the social ties. Second, we present a study of predicting two users whether or not they will meet (co-occur) at a place in a given future time, by exploring their check-in habits. In particular, we first introduce two new concepts, bag-of-location and bag-of-time-lag, to characterize user's check-in habits. Based on such bag representations, we define a similarity metric called habits similarity to measure the similarity between two users' check-in habits. Then we propose a machine learning formula for predicting co-occurrence based on the social ties and habits similarities. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on our dataset, and the results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.