Spatio-Temporal Modeling of Users' Check-ins in Location-Based Social Networks

People can upload a geotagged video, photo or text to social networks like Facebook and Twitter, share their present location on Foursquare or share their travel route using GPS trajectories to GeoLife [49]. A considerable amount of this spatiotemporal data is generated by the activity of users in location-based social networks (LBSN). In a typical LBSN, like Foursquare, users share the time and geolocation of their check-ins, comment about it, or unlock badges by exploring new venues. Many techniques have been proposed for processing, managing, and mining the trajectory data in the past decade [55]. Several other studies try to leverage the spatial data in recommender systems [23]. However, a few works have attempted to model the spatiotemporal behavior of users in LBSNs [5, 6]. Given the history of users' check-ins, the goal is to predict the time and location of This work is supported by ICT Innovation Center, Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page.