NCF: A Neural Context Fusion Approach to Raw Mobility Annotation

Understanding human mobility patterns at the point-of-interest (POI) scale plays an important role in enhancing business intelligence in mobile environments. While large efforts have been made in this direction, most studies simply utilize POI check-ins to mine the concerned mobility patterns, the effectiveness of which is usually hindered due to data sparsity. To obtain better POI-based human mobility for mining, in this paper, we strive to directly annotate the POIs associated with raw user-generated mobility records. We propose a neural context fusion approach which integrates various context factors in people's POI-visiting behaviors. Our approach evaluates the preference and transition factors via representation learning. Notably, we incorporate an attention mechanism to deal with the randomized transitions in raw mobility. The domain knowledge factors, i.e. distance, time and popularity, remain effective and our approach further includes them from a data-driven perspective. Factors are automatically fused with a feed-forward neural network. Furthermore, we exploit a multi-head architecture to enhance the model expressiveness. Using two real-life data sets, we conduct extensive experiments and find that our approach consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines by at least 32% in accuracy. Besides, we demonstrate the utility of the obtained POI-based human mobility with a POI recommendation example.