Identifying Similar Users Based on Their Check-in Data: A Graph Embedding Approach

Abstract

In recent years, the amount of user check-in data has significantly increased on social network platforms. Such data is an ideal source for characterizing user behaviors and identifying similar users, contributing to many research areas (e.g. user-based collaborative filtering). However, existing trajectory-based user similarity analysis approaches do not distinguish the effects of geographical factors at a fine-grained level, and thus are not able to unleash the full power of semantic information that is hidden in the trajectory. In this paper, we have proposed an effective graph embedding approach to identify similar users based on their check-in data. Specifically, we firstly identify meaningful concepts of user check-in data, based on which we design two metagraphs for representing features of similar user behaviors. Then we characterize each user with a sequence of nodes that are derived through a metagraph-guided random walk strategy. Such sequences are embedded to generate meaningful user vectors for measuring user similarity and eventually identifying similar users. We have evaluated our proposal on three public datasets, the results of which show that our approach is 4% higher than the best existing approach in terms of F1-measure.