Collaborative Place Models

A fundamental problem underlying location-based tasks is to construct a complete profile of users’ spatiotemporal patterns. In many real-world settings, the sparsity of location data makes it difficult to construct such a profile. As a remedy, we describe a Bayesian probabilistic graphical model, called Collaborative Place Model (CPM), which infers similarities across users to construct complete and time-dependent profiles of users’ whereabouts from unsupervised location data. We apply CPM to both sparse and dense datasets, and demonstrate how it both improves location prediction performance and provides new insights into users’ spatiotemporal patterns.