Mining Object Similarity for Predicting Next Locations

Next location prediction is of great importance for many location-based applications. With the virtue of solid theoretical foundations, Markov-based approaches have gained success along this direction. In this paper, we seek to enhance the prediction performance by understanding the similarity between objects. In particular, we propose a novel method, called weighted Markov model (weighted-MM), which exploits both the sequence of just-passed locations and the object similarity in mining the mobility patterns. To this end, we first train a Markov model for each object with its own trajectory records, and then quantify the similarities between different objects from two aspects: spatial locality similarity and trajectory similarity. Finally, we incorporate the object similarity into the Markov model by considering the similarity as the weight of the probability of reaching each possible next location, and return the top-rankings as results. We have conducted extensive experiments on a real dataset, and the results demonstrate significant improvements in prediction accuracy over existing solutions.