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Unsupervised Learning of Parsimonious General-Purpose Embeddings for User and Location Modeling

Published: 13 March 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Many social network applications depend on robust representations of spatio-temporal data. In this work, we present an embedding model based on feed-forward neural networks which transforms social media check-ins into dense feature vectors encoding geographic, temporal, and functional aspects for modeling places, neighborhoods, and users. We employ the embedding model in a variety of applications including location recommendation, urban functional zone study, and crime prediction. For location recommendation, we propose a Spatio-Temporal Embedding Similarity algorithm (STES) based on the embedding model.
In a range of experiments on real life data collected from Foursquare, we demonstrate our model’s effectiveness at characterizing places and people and its applicability in aforementioned problem domains. Finally, we select eight major cities around the globe and verify the robustness and generality of our model by porting pre-trained models from one city to another, thereby alleviating the need for costly local training.

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cover image ACM Transactions on Information Systems
ACM Transactions on Information Systems  Volume 36, Issue 3
July 2018
402 pages
ISSN:1046-8188
EISSN:1558-2868
DOI:10.1145/3146384
Issue’s Table of Contents
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Publication History

Published: 13 March 2018
Accepted: 01 January 2018
Revised: 01 January 2018
Received: 01 July 2017
Published in TOIS Volume 36, Issue 3

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Author Tags

  1. Social networks
  2. check-in embedding
  3. crime prediction
  4. personalized location recommendation
  5. urban functional zone study

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  • (2023)A Spatial and Adversarial Representation Learning Approach for Land Use Classification with POIsACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/362782414:6(1-25)Online publication date: 14-Nov-2023
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