Probabilistic identification of visited point-of-interest for personalized automatic check-in

Automatic check-in, which is to identify a user's visited points of interest (POIs) from his or her trajectories, is still an open problem because of positioning errors and the high POI density in small areas. In this study, we propose a probabilistic visited-POI identification method. The method uses a new hierarchical Bayesian model for identifying the latent visited-POI label of stay points, which are automatically extracted from trajectories. This model learns from labeled and unlabeled stay point data (i.e., semi-supervised learning) and takes into account personal preferences, stay locations including positioning errors, stay times for each category, and prior knowledge about typical user preferences and stay times. Experimental results with real user trajectories and POIs of Foursquare demonstrated that our method achieved statistically significant improvements in precision at 1 and recall at 3 over the nearest neighbor method and a conventional method that uses a supervised learning-to-rank algorithm.