TrajGEOS: Trajectory Graph Enhanced Orientation-Based Sequential Network for Mobility Prediction

Human mobility studies how people move to access their needed resources and plays a significant role in urban planning and location-based services. As a paramount task of human mobility modeling, next location prediction is challenging because of the diversity of users’ historical trajectories that gives rise to complex mobility patterns and various contexts. Deep sequential models have been widely used to predict the next location by leveraging the inherent sequentiality of trajectory data. However, they do not fully leverage the relationship between locations and fail to capture users’ multilevel preferences. This work constructs a trajectory graph from users’ historical traces and proposes a Trajectory Graph Enhanced Orientation-based Sequential network (TrajGEOS) for next-location prediction tasks. TrajGEOS introduces hierarchical graph convolution to capture location and user embeddings. Such embeddings consider not only the contextual feature of locations but also the relation between them, and serve as additional features in downstream modules. Specifically, TrajGEOS models short-term preferences from recent trajectory sequences via GRU, mid-term preferences from historical trajectories over weeks through attention mechanisms, and long-term preferences from the global trajectory graph. Extensive experiments on three real-world LBSN datasets corroborate the value of graph and orientation-based modules and demonstrate that TrajGEOS outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the next location prediction task.