Where have you been: Dual spatiotemporal-aware user mobility modeling for missing check-in POI identification

Abstract

The prevalence of Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) services makes next personalized Point-of-Interest (POI) predictions become a trending research topic. However, due to device failure or intention camouflage, geolocation information missing prevents existing POI-oriented researches for advanced user preference analysis. To this end, we propose a novel model named Bi-STAN, which fuses bi-direction spatiotemporal transition patterns and personalized dynamic preferences, to identify where the user has visited at a past specific time, namely missing check-in POI identification. Furthermore, to relieve data sparsity issues, Bi-STAN explicitly exploits spatiotemporal characteristics by doing bilateral traceback to search related items with high predictive power from user mobility traces. Specifically, Bi-STAN introduces (1) a temporal-aware attention semantic category encoder to unveil the latent semantic category transition patterns by modeling temporal periodicity and attenuation; (2) a spatial-aware attention POI encoder to capture the latent POI transition pattern by modeling spatial regularity and proximity; (3) a multitask-oriented decoder to incorporate personalized and temporal variance preference into learned transition patterns for missing check-in POI and category identification. Based on the complementarity and compatibility of multi-task learning, we further develop Bi-STAN with a self-adaptive learning rate for model optimization. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show the effectiveness of our proposed method. Significantly, Bi-STAN can also be adaptively applied to next POI prediction task with outstanding performances.