Next Location Prediction with a Graph Convolutional Network Based on a Seq2seq Framework

Predicting human mobility has always been an important task in Location-based Social Network. Previous efforts fail to capture spatial dependence effectively, mainly reflected in weakening the location topology information. In this paper, we propose a neural network-based method which can capture spatial-temporal dependence to predict the next location of a person. Specifically, we involve a graph convolutional network (GCN) based on a seq2seq framework to capture the location topology information and temporal dependence, respectively. The encoder of the seq2seq framework first generates the hidden state and cell state of the historical trajectories. The GCN is then used to generate graph embeddings of the location topology graph. Finally, we predict future trajectories by aggregated temporal dependence and graph embeddings in the decoder. For evaluation, we leverage two real-world datasets, Foursquare and Gowalla. The experimental results demonstrate that our model has a better performance than the compared models.