Survey on user location prediction based on geo-social networking data

With the popularity of smart mobile terminals and advances in wireless communication and positioning technologies, Geo-Social Networks (GSNs), which combine location awareness and social service functions, have become increasingly prevalent. The increasing amount of user and location information in GSNs makes the information overload phenomenon more and more serious. Although massive user-generated data brings convenience to users’ social and travel activities, it also causes certain trouble for their daily life. In this context, users are expecting smarter mobile applications, so that the location information can be employed to perceive their surrounding environment intelligently and further mine their behavior patterns in GSNs, which ultimately provides personalized location-based services for users. Therefore, research on user location prediction comes into existence and has received extensive and in-depth attention from researchers. Through systematically analyzing the location data carried by user check-ins and comments, user location prediction can mine various user behavior patterns and personal preferences, thus determining the visiting location of users in the future. Research on user location prediction is still in the ascendant and it has become an important topic of common concern in both academia and industry. This survey takes Geo-social networking data as the focal point to elaborate the recent progress in user location prediction from multiple aspects such as problem categories, data sources, feature extraction, mathematical models and evaluation metrics. Besides, the difficulties to be studied and the future developmental trends of user location prediction are discussed.