Effective and efficient user account linkage across location based social networks

Sources of complementary information are connected when we link the user accounts belonging to the same user across different domains or devices. The expanded information promotes the development of a wide range of applications, such as cross-domain prediction, cross-domain recommendation, and advertisement. Due to the great significance of user account linkage, there are increasing research works on this study. With the widespread popularization of GPS-enabled mobile devices, linking user accounts with location data has become an important and promising research topic. Being different from most existing studies in this domain that only focus on the effectiveness, we propose novel approaches to improve both effectiveness and efficiency of user account linkage. In this paper, a kernel density estimation (KDE) based method has been proposed to improve the accuracy by alleviating the data sparsity problem in measuring users' similarities. To improve the efficiency, we develop a grid-based structure to organize location data to prune the search space. The extensive experiments conducted on two real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach in terms of both effectiveness and efficiency compared with the state-of-Art methods.