Exploring Social-Historical Ties on Location-Based Social Networks

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have become a popular form of social media in recent years. They provide location related services that allow users to “check-in” at geographical locations and share such experiences with their friends. Millions of “check-in” records in LBSNs contain rich information of social and geographical context and provide a unique opportunity for researchers to study user’s social behavior from a spatial-temporal aspect, which in turn enables a variety of services including place advertisement, traffic forecasting, and disaster relief. In this paper, we propose a social-historical model to explore user’s check-in behavior on LBSNs. Our model integrates the social and historical effects and assesses the role of social correlation in user’s check-in behavior. In particular, our model captures the property of user’s check-in history in forms of power-law distribution and short-term effect, and helps in explaining user’s check-in behavior. The experimental results on a real world LBSN demonstrate that our approach properly models user’s checkins and shows how social and historical ties can help location prediction.