UeLP: accurate user linkage across social platforms against location errors

Abstract User linkage across social platforms can connect the accounts of the same user across different social networks, which is crucial for the identification of users’ multiple social identities and cross-platform association analysis. Cross-platform user linkage based on location is a typical method in current research. These methods typically rely on check-in data to calculate user similarity. However, different from check-in location, the location data obtained from instant messaging social platforms may contain random errors, leading to low accuracy of user linkage of such methods. To solve this problem, this paper proposes an accurate user linkage method across social platforms against location errors. First, unlike existing methods that employ fixed-size grids, this paper uses a multi-grained spatio-temporal grid to organize data, in order to accurately extract user features from error locations. Then, by extracting coarse-grained movement pattern features from user trajectories, candidate users are filtered out, and a small subset of candidate uses is generated to effectively reduce the search space. Next, we establish a weight model based on grid contribution and motion sequence similarity to extract location and temporal features with stronger user orientation. Finally, according to the weight model, the weighted cluster center distance of trajectories is used to calculate the similarity between two different user trajectories. The user with the highest similarity is selected from the candidate subset to complete the user linkage. The extensive experiments are conducted on six public datasets containing 115 866 trajectories and a self-built dataset with 5358 trajectories. The results show the following: compared with the four existing typical location-based methods $k$-BCT, GS, TF-IDF, and TF-IWF, the accuracy Acc@1 is improved by an average of 33%, 44.94%, 15.2%, and 14.55%, respectively, and the accuracy Acc@3 is improved by 30.52%, 34.67%, 13.84%, and 13.19%, respectively.