Understanding User Mobility Behaviour: A Study of Check-in Patterns in Location-Based Social Networks

Abstract

Increasingly there is a tendency amongst social media users to ‘check-in’ i.e., an action allowing individuals to share their location at any given time, to places they physically visit through various social media applications like Facebook, Foursquare, etc. Statistics from these applications serve as a huge reservoir of user data which can be used to understand and predict the mobility behaviour of these users through formulation of a recommender system. The two basic methods for developing such a recommender system are memory-based and model-based system. Owing to pronounced limitations of the memory-based system such as the provision of a huge amount of data being essential for effective performance, this work develops a recommender system using model-based method. User mobility data of New York and Tokyo city (collected over 10 months) is obtained from Foursquare.com. This data is utilized to decipher the mobility behaviour of users: ‘checking-in’ to parks, hotels, recreational centres etc. This data only contains time stamps against the ‘checked-in’ locations. To develop a nuanced recommendation system, further parameters are added qualifying these ‘check-ins’ so that more personalized and precise recommendations are furthered. Firstly, the data is enriched by adding weather as an additional parameter. Secondly, Deep Neural Network” (DNN) is formed by embedding features which are then used to develop the DNN Model. Thirdly, model’s generalization is evaluated through Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) and Mean Square Error (MSE). Based on these evaluations, after testing, it is concluded that MAE produced best result which is only 1.25 on the dataset and value for RMSE is 1.45 which is second best. Moreover, MSE results are not satisfactory being 2.11. It is anticipated that this recommender system will help local e-commerce and other non-e-commerce venues of the region to increase the visibility of their products or services sales by attracting customers through this developed model.