Mining Significant Places from Cell ID Trajectories: A Geo-grid Based Approach

Mining the frequently visited places of single mobile users, i.e., significant places, is crucial for supporting personalized location-based services. Most of existing works for significance place mining have a need to take advantage the GPS trajectories of users. However, it is difficult to encourage mobile users to contribute GPS trajectories because of the high power consumption of GPS. In this paper, we propose a geo-grid based approach for mining significant places from cell ID trajectories. In our approach, the mined significant places are represented as sets of geo-grids which are much smaller than the coverage areas of cell-sites. To be specific, we firstly extract the stay areas where the mobile user used to stay and map them to many geo-grids. Then we mine significant places from the geo-grids by considering their significance. We evaluate the approach on real word data sets and the experimental results clearly show that the proposed approach outperforms two baselines.