Exploring cell tower data dumps for supervised learning-based point-of-interest prediction

Exploring massive mobile data for location-based services (LBS) becomes one of the key challenges in mobile data mining. In this paper, we propose a framework that uses large-scale cell tower data dumps and extracts points-of-interest (POIs) from a social network web site called Weibo, and provides new LBS based on these two data sets, i.e., predicting the existence of POIs and the number of POIs in a certain area. We use Voronoi diagram to divide a city area into non-overlapping regions, and a k-means clustering algorithm to aggregate neighboring cell towers into region groups. A supervised learning algorithm is adopted to build up a model between the number of connections of cell towers and the POIs in different region groups, where a classification or regression model is used to predict the POI existence or the number of POIs, respectively. We studied 12 state-of-the-art classification and regression algorithms, and the experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed framework.