Mining human periodic behaviors via tensor factorization and entropy

Abstract

Understanding human periodic behaviors is crucial in many applications. Existing research has shown the existence of periodicity in human behaviors, but has achieved limited success in leveraging location periodicity and obtaining satisfactory accuracy for oscillations in human periodic behaviors. In this article, we propose the Mobility Intention and Relative Entropy (MIRE) model to address these challenges. We employ tensor decomposition to extract mobility intentions from spatiotemporal datasets, thereby revealing hidden structures in users’ historical records. Subsequently, we utilize subsequences associated with the same mobility intention to mine human periodic behaviors. Furthermore, we introduce a novel periodicity detection algorithm based on relative entropy. Our experimental results, conducted on real-world datasets, demonstrate the effectiveness of the MIRE model in accurately uncovering human periodic behaviors. Comparative analysis further reveals that the MIRE model significantly outperforms baseline periodicity detection algorithms.