Pre-training context and time aware location embeddings from spatial-temporal trajectories for user next location prediction

Y Lin, H Wan, S Guo, Y Lin - Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on …, 2021 - ojs.aaai.org
Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2021ojs.aaai.org
Pre-training location embeddings from spatial-temporal trajectories is a fundamental
procedure and very beneficial for user next location prediction. In the real world, a location
usually has variable functionalities under different contextual environments. If the exact
functions of a location in the trajectory can be reflected in its embedding, the accuracy of
user next location prediction should be improved. Yet, existing location embeddings pre-
trained on trajectories are mostly based on distributed word representations, which mix a …
Abstract
Pre-training location embeddings from spatial-temporal trajectories is a fundamental procedure and very beneficial for user next location prediction. In the real world, a location usually has variable functionalities under different contextual environments. If the exact functions of a location in the trajectory can be reflected in its embedding, the accuracy of user next location prediction should be improved. Yet, existing location embeddings pre-trained on trajectories are mostly based on distributed word representations, which mix a location's various functionalities into one latent representation vector. To address this problem, we propose a Context and Time aware Location Embedding (CTLE) model, which calculates a location's representation vector with consideration of its specific contextual neighbors in trajectories. In this way, the multi-functional properties of locations can be properly tackled. Furthermore, in order to incorporate temporal information in trajectories into location embeddings, we propose a subtle temporal encoding module and a novel pre-training objective, which further improve the quality of location embeddings. We evaluate our proposed model on two real-world mobile user trajectory datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the existing embedding methods, our CTLE model can pre-train higher quality location embeddings and significantly improve the performance of downstream user location prediction models.
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