Multi-Context Integrated Deep Neural Network Model for Next Location Prediction

The prediction of next location for users in location-based social networks has become an increasing significant requirement since it can benefit both users and business. However, existing methods lack an integrated analysis of sequence context, input contexts, and user preferences in a unified way, and result in an unsatisfactory prediction. Moreover, the interaction between different kinds of input contexts has not been investigated. In this paper, we propose a multi-context integrated deep neural network model (MCI-DNN) to improve the accuracy of the next location prediction. In this model, we integrate sequence context, input contexts, and user preferences into a cohesive framework. First, we model sequence context and interaction of different kinds of input contexts jointly by extending the recurrent neural network to capture the semantic pattern of user behaviors from check-in records. After that, we design a feedforward neural network to capture high-level user preferences from check-in data and incorporate that into MCI-DNN. To deal with different kinds of input contexts in the form of multi-field categorical, we adopt embedding representation technology to automatically learn dense feature representations of input contexts. Experimental results on two typical real-world data sets show that the proposed model outperforms the current state-of-the-art approaches by about 57.12% for Foursquare and 76.4% for Gowalla on average regarding F1-score@5.