Location-based big data analytics for guessing the next Foursquare check-ins

Location-based services on GPS-enabled smartphones are undergoing strong growth. Capitalizing on the popularity of this geo-location social media, a mobile app called Foursquare is developed to recommend its users places where they may be interested in, to travel from their current proximities. Such location data, in the form of check-ins by Foursquare, have huge business potentials including marketing, advertising and consumers’ behaviors analysis. Many researchers from both academia and industries are seriously looking into this location-based big data which comes in high velocity (with millions of users and frequent geo-tagging), and wide variety (with potentially many meta-data and associations), accumulating into a huge volume. One of the fundamental analytics in such big data is to guess which check-in locations a user would move to, as a prerequisite for sequential mining and other lifestyle pattern analysis. This paper reports a novel, but simple big data analytic by sampling a portion of location data for predicting the next check-in locations. This proposed analytic does not need every individual user’s history path and ID to match the history path of the current user in the database in order to infer a prediction. We show by a simulation experiment based on a Foursquare dataset that a minimum of two pairs of coordinates are required to provide a prediction. Several variables such as segment lengths, number of check-ins, and time factors are investigated in the experiment in relation to the prediction accuracy.