Inferring Friendship from Check-in Data of Location-Based Social Networks

Abstract

With the ubiquity of GPS-enabled devices and location-based social network services, research on human mobility becomes quantitatively achievable. Understanding it could lead to appealing applications such as city planning and epidemiology. In this paper, we focus on predicting whether two individuals are friends based on their mobility information. Intuitively, friends tend to visit similar places, thus the number of their co-occurrences should be a strong indicator of their friendship. Besides, the visiting time interval between two users also has an effect on friendship prediction. By exploiting machine learning techniques, we construct two friendship prediction models based on mobility information. The first model focuses on predicting friendship of two individuals with only one of their co-occurred places' information. The second model proposes a solution for predicting friendship of two individuals based on all their co-occurred places. Experimental results show that both of our models outperform the state-of-the-art solutions.