Inferring lifetime status of point-of-interest: A multitask multiclass approach

A Point-of-Interest (POI) refers to a specific location that people may find useful or interesting. In modern cities, a large number of POIs emerge, grow, stabilize for a period, then finally disappear. The stages (e.g., emerge and grow) in this process are called lifetime statuses of a POI. While a large body of research has been devoted to identifying and recommending POIs, there are few studies on inferring the lifetime status of POIs. Indeed, the predictive analytics of POI lifetime status can be valuable for various tasks, such as urban planning, business site selection, and real estate appraisal. In this article, we propose a multitask learning approach, named inferring POI lifetime status, to inferring the POI lifetime status with multifaceted data sources. Specifically, we first define three types of POI lifetime status, i.e., booming, decaying, and stable. Then,we formulate a serial classification problem to predict the sequential/successive lifetime statuses of POIs over time. Leveraging geographical data and human mobility data, we examine and integrate three aspects of features related to the prosperity of POIs, i.e., region popularity, region demands, and peer competitiveness. Next, as the booming/decaying POIs are relatively rare in our data, we perform stable class decomposition to alleviate the imbalance between stable POIs and booming/decaying POIs. Finally, we develop a POI lifetime status classifier by exploiting the multitask learning framework as well as the multiclass kernel-based vector machines. We perform extensive experiments using large-scale and real-world datasets of New York City. The experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach to automatically inferring POI lifetime status.