Finding Potential Propagators and Customers in Location-Based Social Networks: An Embedding-Based Approach

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In the scenarios of location-based social networks (LBSN), the goal of location promotion is to find information propagators to promote a specific point-of-interest (POI). While existing studies mainly focus on accurately recommending POIs for users, less effort is made for identifying propagators in LBSN. In this work, we propose and tackle two novel tasks, Targeted Propagator Discovery (TPD) and Targeted Customer Discovery (TCD), in the context of Location Promotion. Given a target POI l to be promoted, TPD aims at finding a set of influential users, who can generate more users to visit l in the future, and TCD is to find a set of potential users, who will visit l in the future. To deal with TPD and TCD, we propose a novel graph embedding method, LBSN2vec. The main idea is to jointly learn a low dimensional feature representation for each user and each location in an LBSN. Equipped with learned embedding vectors, we propose two similarity-based measures, Influential and Visiting scores, to find potential targeted propagators and customers. Experiments conducted on a large-scale Instagram LBSN dataset exhibit that LBSN2vec and its variant can significantly outperform well-known network embedding methods in both tasks.