Measuring and Recommending Time-Sensitive Routes from Location-Based Data

Location-based services allow users to perform geospatial recording actions, which facilitates the mining of the moving activities of human beings. This article proposes to recommend time-sensitive trip routes consisting of a sequence of locations with associated timestamps based on knowledge extracted from large-scale timestamped location sequence data (e.g., check-ins and GPS traces). We argue that a good route should consider (a) the popularity of places, (b) the visiting order of places, (c) the proper visiting time of each place, and (d) the proper transit time from one place to another. By devising a statistical model, we integrate these four factors into a route goodness function that aims to measure the quality of a route. Equipped with the route goodness, we recommend time-sensitive routes for two scenarios. The first is about constructing the route based on the user-specified source location with the starting time. The second is about composing the route between the specified source location and the destination location given a starting time. To handle these queries, we propose a search method, Guidance Search, which consists of a novel heuristic satisfaction function that guides the search toward the destination location and a backward checking mechanism to boost the effectiveness of the constructed route. Experiments on the Gowalla check-in datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on detecting real routes and performing cloze test of routes, comparing with other baseline methods. We also develop a system TripRouter as a real-time demo platform.