Next location prediction using heterogeneous graph-based fusion network with physical and social awareness

Location prediction based on social media information is highly valuable in human mobility research and has multiple real-life applications. However, existing research methods often ignore social influences, largely ignoring implicit information regarding interactions between users and geographical locations. Additionally, they generally employ single modeling structures, which restricts the effective integration of complex spatiotemporal characteristics and factors influencing user mobility. In this context, we propose a novel network with physical and social awareness that expresses both physical and social influences of user mobility from a global perspective based on a heterogeneous graph constructed using users and spatial locations as nodes and relationships between them as edges. This graph enables the model to leverage information from connected nodes and edges to infer missing or unobserved data. The model predicts future locations of users by effectively integrating the temporal and spatial features of user trajectory series. The proposed model is validated using three social media datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline models. This indicates the importance of considering complex interactions between users and locations, as well as the various influences of physical and social spaces.