Inferring region significance by using multi-source spatial data

The ranking and recommendation of regions of interest are increasingly important in recent years. In this light, we propose and study a novel and interesting problem of inferring region significance using multi-source spatiotemporal data. In our study, POIs, locations, regions, trajectories, and spatial networks are taken into account. Given a set of regions R and a set of trajectories T, we seek for the top-k most attractive regions to users, i.e., regions with the top-k highest spatial-density correlations to the trajectories of travelers. This study is useful in many mobile applications such as urban computing, region recommendation, and location-based service in general. This problem is challenging due to two reasons: (1) how to model the spatial-density correlation effectively and practically and (2) how to process the problem in interactive time. To overcome the challenges, we design a novel spatial-density correlation function to evaluate the relationship between regions and trajectories, and the density of POIs and network distance are taken into account. Then, we develop a series of optimization techniques to accelerate the query efficiency. Furthermore, we develop a parallel mechanism to support big spatial data. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments on real and synthetic spatial data sets to show the efficiency and effectiveness of developed algorithms.