Analyzing mobile-device location histories to characterize consumer behavior

摘要

Provided is a process of inferring a user's reason for movement between geolocations sensed by a mobile device of the user, the process including: obtaining a history of time-stamped geolocations of a user; selecting a plurality of geographic areas based on each of the selected geographic areas including at least one of the time-stamped geolocations; obtaining a probabilistic model specifying parameters comprising: a plurality of candidate user events, each candidate user event being an underlying potential reason why the user moved between geographic locations; probabilities of the user transitioning between each pair of the candidate user events; and probabilities of obtaining a geolocation reported by the computing devices associated with the user in each of the plurality of geographic areas following occurrence of each of the candidate user events; inferring, with one or more processors, one of the candidate user events.