HAP-SAP: Semantic Annotation in LBSNs using Latent Spatio-Temporal Hawkes Process

The prevalence of location-based social networks (LBSNs) has eased the understanding of human mobility patterns. However, categories which act as semantic characterization of the location, might be missing for some check-ins and can adversely affect modelling the mobility dynamics of users. At the same time, mobility patterns provide cues on the missing semantic categories. In this paper, we simultaneously address the problem of semantic annotation of locations and location adoption dynamics of users. We propose our model HAP-SAP, a latent spatio-temporal multivariate Hawkes process, which considers latent semantic category influences, and temporal and spatial mobility patterns of users. The inferred semantic categories can supplement our model on predicting the next check-in events by users. Our experiments on real datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model for the semantic annotation and location adoption modelling tasks.