Predict Next Location of Users using Deep Learning

Abstract: Predicting the next location of a user has been interesting for both academia and industry. Applications like location-based advertising, traffic planning, intelligent resource allocation as well as in recommendation services are some of the problems that many are interested in solving. Along with the technological advancement and the widespread usage of electronic devices, many location-based records are created. Today, deep learning framework has successfully surpassed many conventional methods in many learning tasks, most known in the areas of image and voice recognition. One of the neural network architecture that has shown the promising result at sequential data is Recurrent Neural Network (RNN). Since the creation of RNN, much alternative architecture have been proposed, and architectures like Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Units (GRU) are one of the popular ones that are created[5]. This thesis uses GRU architecture and features that incorporate time and location into the network to forecast people’s next location In this paper, a spatial-temporal neural network (ST-GRU) has been proposed. It can be seen as two parts, which are ST and GRU. The first part is a feature extraction algorithm that pulls out the information from a trajectory into location sequences. That process transforms the trajectory into a friendly sequence format in order to feed into the model. The second part, GRU is proposed to predict the next location given a user’s trajectory. The study shows that the proposed model ST-GRU has the best results comparing the baseline models.