Modeling temporal effects of human mobile behavior on location-based social networks

Abstract

The rapid growth of location-based social networks (LBSNs) invigorates an increasing number of LBSN users, providing an unprecedented opportunity to study human mobile behavior from spatial, temporal, and social aspects. Among these aspects, temporal effects offer an essential contextual cue for inferring a user's movement. Strong temporal cyclic patterns have been observed in user movement in LBSNs with their correlated spatial and social effects (i.e., temporal correlations). It is a propitious time to model these temporal effects (patterns and correlations) on a user's mobile behavior. In this paper, we present the first comprehensive study of temporal effects on LBSNs. We propose a general framework to exploit and model temporal cyclic patterns and their relationships with spatial and social data. The experimental results on two real-world LBSN datasets validate the power of temporal effects in capturing user mobile behavior, and demonstrate the ability of our framework to select the most effective location prediction algorithm under various combinations of prediction models.