gSCorr: Modeling geo-social correlations for new check-ins on location-based social networks

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have attracted an increasing number of users in recent years. The availability of geographical and social information of online LBSNs provides an unprecedented opportunity to study the human movement from their socio-spatial behavior, enabling a variety of location-based services. Previous work on LBSNs reported limited improvements from using the social network information for location prediction; as users can check-in at new places, traditional work on location prediction that relies on mining a user's historical trajectories is not designed for this "cold start" problem of predicting new check-ins. In this paper, we propose to utilize the social network information for solving the "cold start" location prediction problem, with a geo-social correlation model to capture social correlations on LBSNs considering social networks and geographical distance. The experimental results on a real-world LBSN demonstrate that our approach properly models the social correlations of a user's new check-ins by considering various correlation strengths and correlation measures.