Article Review

Predication of User Location using the

Radiation Model and Social Check-lns
Brief description of the work
Predicting the location of a person at a certain time is
very important for many computer applications.
 For instance, venue recommender systems, city traffic
modeling systems, urban planning systems

This research article proposes a new approach for the

prediction of user location at a particular time.
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The approach has two components. These are
 Spatio-temporal component which uses coordinates
and times of user check-ins and
 social component which use of the social interaction of a
user.
The research is aimed to improve the performance of a
state-of the art model using the radiation model.
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The performance enhancement is through increasing
the accuracy of the prediction ability of the model as
compared to the existing models such as the periodic
mobility model (PMM) and the periodic and social
mobility model (PSMM).
Periodic mobility model (PMM)
PMM consists of two parts spatial and temporal. The
spatial part of the PMM represents both clusters as 2D
Gaussian distribution. The temporal part model the
probability of the individual being in some where
represents as 1D Gaussian distribution and PMM does
not take time into account.
Periodic and social mobility model
(PSMM)
PSMM an extension of PMM. It consists of two
components spatio-temporal and social. PSMM uses
only social connections of a given user instead of use
knowledge about categories of venues (cinema, coffee
shop, football stadium etc.) as well as global patterns
of mobility, i.e. number of check-ins at venues
performed by all users.
Radation model
Radiation model approach uses Spatio-temporal
information form user check-ins by applying the
radiation model instead of Gaussians used by PSMM
and PMM. Moreover it is based on coordinate and
time the user check-ins and social interaction b/n
different users.
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The radiation model can be written as follows.
Pij = m.n/[(m+ Sij) (m+n + Sij)]

Where Pij is the probability of an individual moving

from location i to location j and m is the attractiveness
of i and j is the attractiveness of j. Sij the attractiveness
of the places within a cirlcle of radius Rij centered at i.
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The research gets a data from the social networks as a
basic ingredient to find out the location of a particular
user at a point in time.
 Examples of such social networks include face book and
foursquare.
It takes 90 users in the data set check-ins that users
made on Foursquare between 13/07/2012 and
24/07/2012.
Social network communication
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The results of our experiment strongly suggest that
both the spatio-temporal and social components
proposed in this paper perform better than the state-
of-the-art baseline. The radiation model proved to be
better than PMM and PSMM.
Objective of the research work
General objective
The general objective of the research is to come up
with a predictive model for the location of a certain
user at a certain time of Location based social
networks with better performance and accuracy than
the current-state of art model(PSMM).
Specific objective
Answering the following questions.
 What is the best combination of spatio-temporal and
social components?
 What is the best social component?
 What is the best spatio-temporal component?
Contribution of the work
The research contribution is the introduction of the
Radiation model to improve the performance of the
Periodic and social Mobility model (PSMM).
Critiques
Strong Points
The overall document organization of the article is
good.
 
The abstract represents the whole document very well.

The problem is identified and stated properly.

Related works have been discussed properly.

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The research article uses recent reference. Out of 17
references 16 of them published within the last 5 years.

The conclusion and future work section of the

research paper gives general finalization in the article
and an indication for future work.

The document is citied properly.

 
Weak Points
The title of the research, more or less describe the
content but it would have been better if the title
included the word improving/enhancing.

 There are few spelling errors. For example, on page 3

the writers have misspelled the word than as then.
Moreover, there are few unnecessary punctuation
marks on the same page. For instance, the formula
on page 3 contain the “‘” symbol.
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Introduction tries to introduce the topic but the
discussion is more on the related works.

In experimental setup section of the article lacks

clarity. For example, it uses the Stanford without
telling the reader what it represents.
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The sample data taken for the experiment is moderate.
It uses data of only 90 users. But it would have been
better if the sample size were bigger than this.

The research does not make any distinctions between

the training and test data. It seems, it is using the same
sample data for both purposes.
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The research states that people movements are the
result of periodic movements and social influences
with out considering impact of culture and religion.

The methodology of research meaning the data

capture is clear but the process of approaches and
statistical method are complicate to understandable.
Summary
Prediction of user location at certain time is now
much better predicted due to the contribution of this
research paper.
 It increases the accuracy of prediction of user’s locations
due to the incorporation of Radiation model.
 It tried to fills the gaps left out by the previously applied
approaches.
Thank You
The End