Location Prediction: A Temporal-Spatial Bayesian Model

In social networks, predicting a user’s location mainly depends on those of his/her friends, where the key lies in how to select his/her most influential friends. In this article, we analyze the theoretically maximal accuracy of location prediction based on friends’ locations and compare it with the practical accuracy obtained by the state-of-the-art location prediction methods. Upon observing a big gap between the theoretical and practical accuracy, we propose a new strategy for selecting influential friends in order to improve the practical location prediction accuracy. Specifically, several features are defined to measure the influence of the friends on a user’s location, based on which we put forth a sequential random-walk-with-restart procedure to rank the friends of the user in terms of their influence. By dynamically selecting the top N most influential friends of the user per time slice, we develop a temporal-spatial Bayesian model to characterize the dynamics of friends’ influence for location prediction. Finally, extensive experimental results on datasets of real social networks demonstrate that the proposed influential friend selection method and temporal-spatial Bayesian model can significantly improve the accuracy of location prediction.