REPLAY: Modeling Time-Varying Temporal Regularities of Human Mobility for Location Prediction over Sparse Trajectories

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Deng, Bangchao, Qu, Bingqing, Wang, Pengyang, Yang, Dingqi, Fankhauser, Benjamin, Cudre-Mauroux, Philippe
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Deng, Bangchao
Qu, Bingqing
Wang, Pengyang
Yang, Dingqi
Fankhauser, Benjamin
Cudre-Mauroux, Philippe
author_facet Deng, Bangchao
Qu, Bingqing
Wang, Pengyang
Yang, Dingqi
Fankhauser, Benjamin
Cudre-Mauroux, Philippe
contents Location prediction forecasts a user's location based on historical user mobility traces. To tackle the intrinsic sparsity issue of real-world user mobility traces, spatiotemporal contexts have been shown as significantly useful. Existing solutions mostly incorporate spatiotemporal distances between locations in mobility traces, either by feeding them as additional inputs to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) or by using them to search for informative past hidden states for prediction. However, such distance-based methods fail to capture the time-varying temporal regularities of human mobility, where human mobility is often more regular in the morning than in other periods, for example; this suggests the usefulness of the actual timestamps besides the temporal distances. Against this background, we propose REPLAY, a general RNN architecture learning to capture the time-varying temporal regularities for location prediction. Specifically, REPLAY not only resorts to the spatiotemporal distances in sparse trajectories to search for the informative past hidden states, but also accommodates the time-varying temporal regularities by incorporating smoothed timestamp embeddings using Gaussian weighted averaging with timestamp-specific learnable bandwidths, which can flexibly adapt to the temporal regularities of different strengths across different timestamps. Our extensive evaluation compares REPLAY against a sizable collection of state-of-the-art techniques on two real-world datasets. Results show that REPLAY consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.7\%-10.5\% in the location prediction task, and the bandwidths reveal interesting patterns of the time-varying temporal regularities.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_16310
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle REPLAY: Modeling Time-Varying Temporal Regularities of Human Mobility for Location Prediction over Sparse Trajectories
Deng, Bangchao
Qu, Bingqing
Wang, Pengyang
Yang, Dingqi
Fankhauser, Benjamin
Cudre-Mauroux, Philippe
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Location prediction forecasts a user's location based on historical user mobility traces. To tackle the intrinsic sparsity issue of real-world user mobility traces, spatiotemporal contexts have been shown as significantly useful. Existing solutions mostly incorporate spatiotemporal distances between locations in mobility traces, either by feeding them as additional inputs to Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) or by using them to search for informative past hidden states for prediction. However, such distance-based methods fail to capture the time-varying temporal regularities of human mobility, where human mobility is often more regular in the morning than in other periods, for example; this suggests the usefulness of the actual timestamps besides the temporal distances. Against this background, we propose REPLAY, a general RNN architecture learning to capture the time-varying temporal regularities for location prediction. Specifically, REPLAY not only resorts to the spatiotemporal distances in sparse trajectories to search for the informative past hidden states, but also accommodates the time-varying temporal regularities by incorporating smoothed timestamp embeddings using Gaussian weighted averaging with timestamp-specific learnable bandwidths, which can flexibly adapt to the temporal regularities of different strengths across different timestamps. Our extensive evaluation compares REPLAY against a sizable collection of state-of-the-art techniques on two real-world datasets. Results show that REPLAY consistently and significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods by 7.7\%-10.5\% in the location prediction task, and the bandwidths reveal interesting patterns of the time-varying temporal regularities.
title REPLAY: Modeling Time-Varying Temporal Regularities of Human Mobility for Location Prediction over Sparse Trajectories
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.16310