A Multi-Level Attentive Context-Aware Trajectory Prediction Algorithm for Mobile Social Users

Abstract

The prediction of a user’s trajectory is a key problem in mobility prediction, which has been applied to a range of fields such as location-based service recommendations and traffic planning. The impact of users’ social contacts on mobility is not adequately considered in the current trajectory prediction research. Furthermore, the spatial–temporal dependence of long trajectories is difficult to characterize by conventional recurrent neural network models. A multi-level attentive context-aware trajectory prediction model (MACTP) for mobile social users is proposed in this research to address the above problems. Specifically, users’ social preferences are captured by friend-level attention, and different friends are allocated varying weights. The impact of other check-in points in the trajectory on the present check-in point is considered through check-in-level attention. Trajectory-level attention is used to obtain the representation of historical trajectories influenced by current trajectories, as well as the spatial–temporal dependencies of longer trajectories. Experimental results on two real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly improves trajectory prediction performance.