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Who is your friend: inferring cross-regional friendship from mobility profiles

  • Track 5: Multimedia and Education
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Abstract

Location Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have been widely used as a primary data source to study friendship inference. Traditional approaches mainly focused on exploring pairwise co-location frequency, that it, the more frequency two users co-location, the more likely that they are friends. Such methods fail to solve the geographically restricted friends recommendation. In this paper, we tackle a novel friendship inference problem: cross-regional friendship inference, i.e., inferring whether users from different regions are friends. By revisiting mobility and social friendship of cross-regional friends based on a large-scale LBSNs dataset, we spot that cross-regional users are likely to form friendship when their mobility profiles are of high similarity. To this end, we propose Category-Aware Heterogeneous Graph Embedding Framework (CHGE) for inferring cross-regional friendship. We first utilize multi-bipartite graph embedding to capture users’ mobility neighbor proximity and activity category preference simultaneously, then the contributions of Point of Interest (POI) and category are learned by a category-aware heterogeneous graph attention network in an unsupervised method. Extensive evaluations on the real-world LBSNs dataset show that our CHGE significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches by up to 9.7% on Area Under the ROC Curve (AUC) and 7.3% on Average Precision (AP).

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Acknowledgements

The work is supported by the National Nature Science Foundation of China (No.U1803262), National Social Science Foundation of China (No.19ZDA113), Application Foundation Frontier Project of Wuhan Science and Technology Bureau (No.2020010601012288) and National Nature Science Foundation of China (No.U1736206).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Engineering Research Center for Multimedia Software, School of Computer Science, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China

    Lingfei Ren, Ruimin Hu, Zheng Wang, Junhang Wu, Xixi Li & Wenyi Hu

  2. School of Artificial Intelligence, Jianghan University, Wuhan, China

    Dengshi Li

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  1. Lingfei Ren
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  2. Ruimin Hu
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  3. Dengshi Li
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  4. Zheng Wang
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Correspondence to Ruimin Hu.

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Ren, L., Hu, R., Li, D. et al. Who is your friend: inferring cross-regional friendship from mobility profiles. Multimed Tools Appl 82, 12719–12737 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-022-13672-8

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