Predicting Visitors Using Location-Based Social Networks

Location-based social networks (LBSN) are social networks complemented with users’ location data, such as geotagged activity data. Predicting such activities finds application in marketing, recommendation systems, and logistics management. In this paper, we exploit LBSN data to predict future visitors at given locations. We fetch the travel history of visitors by their check-ins in LBSNs and identify five features that significantly drive the mobility of a visitor towards a location: (i) historic visits, (ii) location category, (iii) time, (iv) distance, and (v) friends’ activities. We provide a visitor prediction model, CMViP, based on collective matrix factorization and influence propagation. CMViP first utilizes collective matrix factorization to map the first four features to a common latent space to find visitors having a significant potential to visit a given location. Then, it utilizes an influence-mining approach to further incorporate friends of those visitors, who are influenced by the visitors’ activities and likely to follow them. Our experiments on two real-world datasets show that our methods outperform the state of art in terms of precision and accuracy.