Early Destination Prediction with Spatio-temporal User Behavior Patterns

Predicting user behavior makes it possible to provide personalized services. Destination prediction (e.g. predicting a future location) can be applied to various practical applications. An example of destination prediction is personalized GIS services, which are expected to provide alternate routes to enable users to avoid congested roads. However, the destination prediction problem requires critical trade-offs between timing and accuracy. In this paper, we focus on early destination prediction as the central issue, as early recognition in destination prediction has not been fully explored. As an alternative to the traditional two basic approaches with trajectory tracking that narrow down the candidates with respect to the trip progress, and Next Place Prediction (NPP) that infers the future location of a user from user habits, we propose a new probabilistic model based on both conventional models. The advantage of our model is that it drastically narrows down the destination candidates efficiently at the early stage of a trip, owing to the staying information derived from the NPP approach. In other words, our approach achieves high prediction accuracy by considering both approaches at the same time. To implement our model, we employ SubSynE for state-of-the-art prediction based on trajectory tracking as well as a multi-class logistic regression based on user contexts. Despite the simplicity of our model, the proposed method provides improved performance compared to conventional approaches based on the experimental results using the GPS logs of 1,646 actual users from the commercial services.