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Exploring cell tower data dumps for supervised learning-based point-of-interest prediction (industrial paper)

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Abstract

Exploring massive mobile data for location-based services becomes one of the key challenges in mobile data mining. In this paper, we investigate a problem of finding a correlation between the collective behavior of mobile users and the distribution of points of interest (POIs) in a city. Specifically, we use large-scale cell tower data dumps collected from cell towers and POIs extracted from a popular social network service, Weibo. Our objective is to make use of the data from these two different types of sources to build a model for predicting the POI densities of different regions in the covered area. An application domain that may benefit from our research is a business recommendation application, where a prediction result can be used as a recommendation for opening a new store/branch. The crux of our contribution is the method of representing the collective behavior of mobile users as a histogram of connection counts over a period of time in each region. This representation ultimately enables us to apply a supervised learning algorithm to our problem in order to train a POI prediction model using the POI data set as the ground truth. We studied 12 state-of-the-art classification and regression algorithms; experimental results demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.

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Notes

  1. http://www.chinamobileltd.com

  2. http://weibo.com

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Acknowledgments

R. Wang and C.-Y. Chow were partially supported by a research grant (CityU Project No. 9231131). S. Nutanong was partially supported by a CityU research grant (CityU Project No. 7200387). This work was also supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under the Grant 61402460.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong, 83 Tat Chee Avenue, Kowloon, Hong Kong

    Ran Wang, Chi-Yin Chow, Yan Lyu, Victor C. S. Lee & Sarana Nutanong

  2. Department of Computer Science, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), Worcester, USA

    Yanhua Li

  3. Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab, Shatin, Hong Kong

    Mingxuan Yuan

Authors
  1. Ran Wang
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  2. Chi-Yin Chow
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  3. Yan Lyu
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  4. Victor C. S. Lee
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  5. Sarana Nutanong
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  6. Yanhua Li
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  7. Mingxuan Yuan
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Correspondence to Chi-Yin Chow.

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Wang, R., Chow, CY., Lyu, Y. et al. Exploring cell tower data dumps for supervised learning-based point-of-interest prediction (industrial paper). Geoinformatica 20, 327–349 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-015-0237-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10707-015-0237-7

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