Predicting User Activity Intensity Using Geographic Interactions Based on Social Media Check-In Data

Predicting user activity intensity is crucial for various applications. However, existing studies have two main problems. First, as user activity intensity is nonstationary and nonlinear, traditional methods can hardly fit the nonlinear spatio-temporal relationships that characterize user mobility. Second, user movements between different areas are valuable, but have not been utilized for the construction of spatial relationships. Therefore, we propose a deep learning model, the geographical interactions-weighted graph convolutional network-gated recurrent unit (GGCN-GRU), which is good at fitting nonlinear spatio-temporal relationships and incorporates users’ geographic interactions to construct spatial relationships in the form of graphs as the input. The model consists of a graph convolutional network (GCN) and a gated recurrent unit (GRU). The GCN, which is efficient at processing graphs, extracts spatial features. These features are then input into the GRU, which extracts their temporal features. Finally, the GRU output is passed through a fully connected layer to obtain the predictions. We validated this model using a social media check-in dataset and found that the geographical interactions graph construction method performs better than the baselines. This indicates that our model is appropriate for fitting the complex nonlinear spatio-temporal relationships that characterize user mobility and helps improve prediction accuracy when considering geographic flows.