Exploiting spatio-temporal user behaviors for user linkage

Cross-device and cross-domain user linkage have been attracting a lot of attention recently. An important branch of the study is to achieve user linkage with spatio-temporal data generated by the ubiquitous GPS-enabled devices. The main task in this problem is twofold, i.e., how to extract the representative features of a user; how to measure the similarities between users with the extracted features. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel model STUL (Spatio-Temporal User Linkage) that consists of the following two components. 1) Extract users' spatial features with a density based clustering method, and extract the users' temporal features with the Gaussian Mixture Model. To link user pairs more precisely, we assign different weights to the extracted features, by lightening the common features and highlighting the discriminative features. 2) Propose novel approaches to measure the similarities between users based on the extracted features, and return the pair-wise users with similarity scores higher than a predefined threshold. We have conducted extensive experiments on three real-world datasets, and the results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed STUL over the state-of-the-art methods.