CoMiner: nationwide behavior-driven unsupervised spatial coordinate mining from uncertain delivery events

Geocoding, associating textual addresses with corresponding GPS coordinates, is vital for many location-based services (e.g., logistics, ridesharing, and social networks). One of the most common Geocoding solutions is using commercial map services (e.g., Google Maps) by uploading textual addresses to obtain corresponding coordinates. However, this is typically not practical for some location-based service providers due to real-world challenges like commercial competition and high costs (recurring fees). In this paper, we design a new cost-effective Geocoding framework to automatically infer the geographic coordinates from textual addresses for service providers. To achieve this, we take the E-Commerce logistics service as a concrete scenario and design CoMiner, an unsupervised coordinate inference framework based on textual address data, delivery event data, and courier trajectory data. There are three main components in CoMiner. (1) A POI-level clustering model by modeling customers' shopping patterns at different spatial granularities; (2) A Delivery Mobility Graph (DMG) by modeling couriers' delivery events and geographic coordinates; (3) A behavior-driven address ranking model by mining couriers' uncertain reporting behaviors to further infer coordinates on DMG. We extensively verify the performance of CoMiner with a three-phase evaluation from data-driven experiments to real-world deployment. (i) We conduct extensive experiments on three large-scale datasets where CoMiner achieves an average accuracy of 95.1%, which outperforms the state-of-the-art methods by 20.3%. (ii) We deploy CoMiner in JD Logistics, inferring coordinates for over 30 million addresses with an average accuracy of 93.3%. (iii) We utilize CoMiner for two Geocoding-based applications, i.e., parcel re-routing optimization and abnormal delivery event detection.