Predicting the sequential behavior of mobile Internet users based on MSM model

The behavior of users concerning mobile Internet varies significantly throughout the day. Results from existing studies—which generally simply segment one day into morning, afternoon, and evening—often provide inaccurate predictions of the behavior of users. To improve prediction accuracy, we propose a segment-based multi-state Markov (SBMSM) model for the dynamic time interval segmentation of the sequential behavior of users. The specific procedure of this proposed model can be described as follows: first, we divide each user’s behaviors into minimum unit according to time dimension; then, we merge adjacent time intervals or ensure they are constant according to the similarities in behavior; and finally, a multi-state Markov (MSM) model is trained using the newly constructed data individually. The experimental results illustrate that for 95.78% of users, an SBMSM model performs much better than a naive MSM model and hidden Markov model.