A Novel Spatiotemporal Behavior-Enabled Random Walk Strategy on Online Social Platforms

Abstract

Location-Based Social Networks have been widely studied in recent years; new approaches constantly developed to solve individuals’ trajectory prediction tasks. However, most of these methods require sufficient data to learn individual features, which is not always satisfied in real situations, especially for online data. The digital data on human behavior typically follows a power-law distribution, indicating that only a few people have rich activities recorded while most people’s behavioral data are limited. In order to overcome this hurdle, our work constructs the user behavior proximity network (UBPN) and proposes a new walking strategy based on this network that extracts the hidden information from the social contacts to substitute the unobserved behavioral information of an individual. Specifically, our proposed walking strategy has two walking paths, accounting for the temporal and social information on the ego users’ and their alters’ mobility activities. This walking strategy is model-agnostic and can be integrated with many existing walk-based deep learning methods. Our work applies the methods on two real-world datasets with rich spatiotemporal information and shows that the performances of the existing prediction methods improve significantly by integrating the proposed walking strategy.