Estimating People's Position Using Matrix Decomposition

Human mobility estimation plays a key factor in a lot of promising applications including location-based recommendation systems, urban planning, and disease outbreak control. We study the human mobility estimation problem in the case where recent locations of a person-of-interest are unknown. Since matrix decomposition is used to perform latent semantic analysis of multi-dimensional data, we propose a human location estimation algorithm based on matrix factorization to reconstruct the human movement patterns through the use of information of persons with correlated movements. Specifically, the optimization problem which minimizes the difference between the reconstructed and actual movement data is first formulated. Then, the gradient descent algorithm is applied to adjust parameters which contribute to reconstructed mobility data. The experiment results show that the proposed framework can be used for the prediction of human location and achieves higher predictive accuracy than a baseline model.