Mining Individual Life Pattern
Based on Location History
Yang Ye
#*1
, Yu Zheng
*2
, Yukun Chen
*3
, Jianhua Feng
#4
, Xing Xie
*5
#
Dept. Of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University
Beijing, 100084, P.R. China
yey05@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn
fengjh@tsinghua.edu.cn
*
Microsoft Research Asia
4F, Sigma Building, No.49 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100190, P. R. China
{yuzheng,v-yukche, xing.xie}@microsoft.com
Abstract— The increasing pervasiveness of location-acquisition
technologies (GPS, GSM networks, etc.) enables people to
conveniently log their location history into spatial-temporal data,
thus giving rise to the necessity as well as opportunity to
discovery valuable knowledge from this type of data. In this
paper, we propose the novel notion of individual life pattern,
which captures individual’s general life style and regularity.
Concretely, we propose the life pattern normal form (the LP-
normal form) to formally describe which kind of life regularity
can be discovered from location history; then we propose the LP-
Mine framework to effectively retrieve life patterns from raw
individual GPS data. Our definition of life pattern focuses on
significant places of individual life and considers diverse
properties to combine the significant places. LP-Mine is
comprised of two phases: the modelling phase and the mining
phase. The modelling phase pre-processes GPS data into an
available format as the input of the mining phase. The mining
phase applies separate strategies to discover different types of
pattern. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments using GPS
data collected by volunteers in the real world to verify the
effectiveness of the framework.
I. INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, the development in location-acquisition
technologies and its embedding into people's daily life results
in a novel type of spatial-temporal data, which traces
individual location history and can be collected by the
wireless network infrastructures. For instance, when mobiles
phones are connected to GSM network, they left positioning
logs together with the timestamp of each log point. Likewise,
GPS-embedded portable devices can also record the latitude-
longitude position at every moment when exposed to a GPS
satellite. The increasing availability of individual location
history data bring us challenges as well as opportunities to
discover valuable knowledge from the raw data.
On this topic, some literatures aim at performing traditional
data mining tasks on spatial-temporal data, like classification
[1], clustering [2], pattern mining [3], [4] and outlier detection
[5]. In the meantime, some techniques have been proposed to
discovery higher level knowledge from individual GPS data
[15], including detecting significant locations of an individual,
predicting the movement destination [6], [11], recognize
individual mobility [14], etc.
However, the first class of research treats location history
data as general spatial-temporal trajectory; thereby loses some
of their inner properties. For instance, each log point in the
location history contains absolute time spot. However, either
Temporally Annotated Sequences in [7] or Trajectory Pattern
Mining in [3] discards this absolute time information and just
calculate the time interval between two points as time
annotation. While current works in the second class typically
mine first-level knowledge about position and mobility from
location history, like significant places, possible destinations,
attribute of mobility like stationary and walking.
Since location history data are individually generated,
given the close relationship between people's daily life and
geographic locations, we claim that one's general life style and
regularity can be discovered from his/her location history.
Resembling traditional definitions of frequent pattern in
transaction database [8], we term individual’s general life
style and regularity life pattern. In contrast to the first level
knowledge about position and mobility, life patterns represent
a higher level knowledge drawn from location history data.
The discovery of life pattern has a manifold of application
scenarios. To illustrate, life pattern reflects the regularity of
one individual, thus can help people better learn their way of
life; it can also be embedded into location recommender
system, context-based computing, precise advertising,
computer-aided schedule and route arrangement. For instance,
if Tom's life pattern about the time he goes to work is
discovered, his intelligent cell phone can automatically help
arrange the travelling route according to that day's traffic
condition. If Tom's general body-building time and place is
discovered, intelligent advertising system may choose that
moment to cast health products advertisement to his mobile
equipment. Also, computer-aided schedule and route
arrangement system can intelligently advice Tom to arrange
the time, route or position of new activities, given his general
life pattern. In the meantime, through collecting and analysing
life patterns of multiple individuals, a lot of statistical and
mining work can be done to discovery valuable knowledge
about social trends and generalities.
This paper is motivated by the increasing availability of
individual GPS data and the usefulness of life pattern. We aim
2009 Tenth International Conference on Mobile Data Management: Systems, Services and Middleware
978-0-7695-3650-7/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MDM.2009.11
1
2009 Tenth International Conference on Mobile Data Management: Systems, Services and Middleware
978-0-7695-3650-7/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/MDM.2009.11
1