ABSTRACT
In this work we study the dynamics of geographic choice, i.e., how users choose one from a set of objects in a geographic region. We postulate a model in which an object is selected from a slate of candidates with probability that depends on how far it is (distance) and how many closer alternatives exist (rank). Under a discrete choice formulation, we argue that there exists a factored form in which unknown functions of rank and distance may be combined to produce an accurate estimate of the likelihood that a user will select each alternative. We then learn these hidden functions and show that each can be closely approximated by an appropriately parameterized lognormal, even though the respective marginals look quite different. We give a theoretical justification to support the presence of lognormal distributions.
We then apply this framework to study restaurant choices in map search logs. We show that a four-parameter model based on combinations of lognormals has excellent performance at predicting restaurant choice, even compared to baseline models with access to the full (densely parameterized) marginal distribution for rank and distance. Finally, we show how this framework can be extended to simultaneously learn a per-restaurant quality score representing the residual likelihood of choice after distance and rank have been accounted for. We show that, compared to a per-place score that predicts likelihood without factoring out rank and distance, our score is a significantly better predictor of user quality judgments.
- L. Backstrom, J. M. Kleinberg, R. Kumar, and J. Novak. Spatial variation in search engine queries. In WWW, pages 357--366, 2008. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. Brockmann, L. Hufnagel, and T. Geisel. The scaling laws of human travel. Nature, 439(7075):462--465, 2006.Google ScholarCross Ref
- X. Cao, G. Cong, and C. Jensen. Mining significant semantic locations from GPS data. VLDB, 3(1--2):1009--1020, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- E. Cho, S. Myers, and J. Leskovec. Friendship and mobility: User movement in location-based social networks. In KDD, pages 1082--1090, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- D. J. Crandall, L. Backstrom, D. Cosley, S. Suri, D. Huttenlocher, and J. Kleinberg. Inferring social ties from geographic coincidences. PNAS, 107(52):22436--22441, 2010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. J. Crandall, L. Backstrom, D. P. Huttenlocher, and J. M. Kleinberg. Mapping the world's photos. In WWW, pages 761--770, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- N. Dalvi, R. Kumar, and B. Pang. Object matching in tweets with spatial models. In WSDM, pages 43--52, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Easa. Urban trip distribution in practice. I: Conventional analysis. Journal of Transportation Engineering, 119(6):793--815, 1993.Google ScholarCross Ref
- J. Eisenstein, B. O'Connor, N. A. Smith, and E. P. Xing. A latent variable model for geographic lexical variation. In EMNLP, pages 1277--1287, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Erlander and N. Stewart. The Gravity Model in Transportation Analysis: Theory and Extensions. CRC Press, 1990.Google Scholar
- R. Freymeyer and P. Ritchey. Spatial distribution of opportunities and magnitude of migration: An investigation of Stouffer's theory. Sociological Perspectives, pages 419--440, 1985.Google ScholarCross Ref
- M. Gonzalez, C. Hidalgo, and A. Barabasi. Understanding individual human mobility patterns. Nature, 453(7196):779--782, 2008.Google ScholarCross Ref
- K. C. Gros and D. G. Markovic. Neuropsychological constraints to human data production on a global scale. Eur Phys J B, 85(28), 2012.Google Scholar
- K. Haynes, D. Poston, and P. Schnirring. Intermetropolitan migration in high and low opportunity areas: Indirect tests of the distance and intervening opportunities hypotheses. Economic Geography, 49(1):68--73, 1973.Google ScholarCross Ref
- W. Jung, F. Wang, and H. Stanley. Gravity model in the Korean highway. Europhysics Letters, 81(4):48005, 2008.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. Koller and N. Friedman. Probabilistic Graphical Models: Principles and Techniques. MIT Press, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Kolmogorov. On a logarithmic normal distribution law of the dimensions of particles under pulverization. Dokl. Akad Nauk, 31(2):99--101, 1941.Google Scholar
- M. Levy. Scale-free human migration and the geography of social networks. Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 389(21):4913--4917, 2010.Google ScholarCross Ref
- D. Liben-Nowell, J. Novak, R. Kumar, P. Raghavan, and A. Tomkins. Geographic routing in social networks. PNAS, 102(33):11623--11628, 2005.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. D. Luce. Individual Choice Behavior: A Theoretical Analysis. Wiley, 1959.Google Scholar
- S. Masin, V. Zudini, and M. Antonelli. Early alternative derivations of Fechner's law. J. History of the Behavioral Sciences, 45:56--65, 2009.Google ScholarCross Ref
- E. Miller. A note on the role of distance in migration: Costs of mobility versus intervening opportunities. Journal of Regional Science, 12(3):475--478, 1972.Google ScholarCross Ref
- R. S. Moyer and T. K. Landauer. Time required for judgements of numerical inequality. Nature, 215(5109):1519--1520, 1967.Google ScholarCross Ref
- A. Noulas, S. Scellato, R. Lambiotte, M. Pontil, and C. Mascolo. A tale of many cities: Universal patterns in human urban mobility. PLoS ONE, 7(5):e37027, 05 2012.Google ScholarCross Ref
- B. O'Connor, J. Eisenstein, E. P. Xing, and N. A. Smith. Discovering demographic language variation. In Workshop on Machine Learning for Social Computing at NIPS, 2010.Google Scholar
- D. Quercia, N. Lathia, F. Calabrese, G. Di Lorenzo, and J. Crowcroft. Recommending social events from mobile phone location data. In ICDM, pages 971--976, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- T. Rappaport. Wireless Communications: Principles and Practice. Prentice Hall PTR, 2nd edition, 2001. Google ScholarDigital Library
- I. Rhee, M. Shin, S. Hong, K. Lee, S. Kim, and S. Chong. On the Lévy-walk nature of human mobility. IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 19(3):630--643, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- A. Sadilek, H. Kautz, and J. Bigham. Finding your friends and following them to where you are. In WSDM, pages 723--732, 2012. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Scellato, C. Mascolo, M. Musolesi, and J. Crowcroft. Track globally, deliver locally: Improving content delivery networks by tracking geographic social cascades. In WWW, pages 457--466, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- S. Scellato, A. Noulas, R. Lambiotte, and C. Mascolo. Socio-spatial properties of online location-based social networks. In ICWSM, pages 329--336, 2011.Google Scholar
- F. Simini, M. González, A. Maritan, and A. Barabási. A universal model for mobility and migration patterns. Nature, 484(7392):96--100, 2012.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P. Sobkowicz, M. Thelwall, K. Buckley, G. Paltoglou, and A. Sobkowicz. Lognormal distributions of user post lengths in Internet discussions - a consequence of the Weber--Fechner law? EPJ Data Science, 2(2), 2013.Google Scholar
- S. Stouffer. Intervening opportunities: A theory relating mobility and distance. American Sociological Review, pages 845--867, 1940.Google Scholar
- J. Taplin and M. Qiu. Car trip attraction and route choice in Australia. Annals of Tourism Research, 24(3):624--637, 1997.Google ScholarCross Ref
- P. Venetis, H. Gonzalez, C. Jensen, and A. Halevy. Hyper-local, directions-based ranking of places. VLDB, 4(5):290--301, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- W. Wadycki. Stouffer's model of migration: A comparison of interstate and metropolitan flows. Demography, 12(1):121--128, 1975.Google ScholarCross Ref
- X. Xiao, Q. Luo, Z. Li, X. Xie, and W.-Y. Ma. A large-scale study on map search logs. TWEB, 4(3), 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- M. Ye, P. Yin, W. Lee, and D. Lee. Exploiting geographical influence for collaborative point-of-interest recommendation. In SIGIR, pages 325--334, 2011. Google ScholarDigital Library
- V. W. Zheng, Y. Zheng, X. Xie, and Q. Yang. Collaborative location and activity recommendations with GPS history data. In WWW, pages 1029--1038, 2010. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Y. Zheng, L. Zhang, X. Xie, and W.-Y. Ma. Mining interesting locations and travel sequences from GPS trajectories. In WWW, pages 791--800, 2009. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Driven by Food: Modeling Geographic Choice
Recommendations
A pragmatic approach to dealing with high-variability in network measurements
IMC '04: Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurementThe Internet is teeming with high variability phenomena, from measured IP flow sizes to aspects of inferred router-level connectivity, but there still exists considerable debate about how best to deal with this encountered high variability and model it. ...
Inferring Venue Visits from GPS Trajectories
SIGSPATIAL '17: Proceedings of the 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information SystemsDigital location traces can help build insights about how citizens experience their cities, but also offer personalized products and experiences to them. Even as data abound, though, building an accurate picture about citizen whereabouts is not always ...
Large-scale analytics of dynamics of choice among discrete alternatives
WebSci '16: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web ScienceThis talk will discuss the theory of discrete choice with a particular focus on aspects that are of interest to practitioners of large-scale data mining and analysis. We'll look at some example types of choice problems, including geographic choice as in ...
Comments