Identifying human mobility via trajectory embeddings

Understanding human trajectory patterns is an important task in many location based social networks (LBSNs) applications, such as personalized recommendation and preference-based route planning. Most of the existing methods classify a trajectory (or its segments) based on spatio-temporal values and activities, into some predefined categories, e.g., walking or jogging. We tackle a novel trajectory classification problem: we identify and link trajectories to users who generate them in the LBSNs, a problem called Trajectory-User Linking (TUL). Solving the TUL problem is not a trivial task because: (1) the number of the classes (i.e., users) is much larger than the number of motion patterns in the common trajectory classification problems; and (2) the location based trajectory data, especially the check-ins, are often extremely sparse. To address these challenges, a Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) based semi-supervised learning model, called TULER (TUL via Embedding and RNN) is proposed, which exploits the spatio-temporal data to capture the underlying semantics of user mobility patterns. Experiments conducted on real-world datasets demonstrate that TULER achieves better accuracy than the existing methods.