The analysis of human location histories is currently getting an increasing attention, due to the widespread usage of geopositioning technologies such as the GPS, and also of online location-based services that allow users to share this information. Tasks such as the prediction of human movement can be addressed through the usage of these data, in turn offering support for more advanced applications, such as adaptive mobile services with proactive context-based functions. This paper presents an hybrid method for predicting human mobility on the basis of Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The proposed approach clusters location histories according to their characteristics, and latter trains an HMM for each cluster. The usage of HMMs allows us to account with location characteristics as unobservable parameters, and also to account with the effects of each individual's previous actions. We report on a series of experiments with a real-world location history dataset from the GeoLife project, showing that a prediction accuracy of 13.85% can be achieved when considering regions of roughly 1280 squared meters.

Toponym matching, i.e. pairing strings that represent the same real-world location, is a fundamental problemfor several practical applications. The current state-of-the-art relies on string similarity metrics, either specifically developed for matching place names or integrated within methods that combine multiple metrics. However, these methods all rely on common sub-strings in order to establish similarity, and they do not effectively capture the character replacements involved in toponym changes due to transliterations or to changes in language and culture over time. In this article, we present a novel matching approach, leveraging a deep neural network to classify pairs of toponyms as either matching or nonmatching. The proposed network architecture uses recurrent nodes to build representations from the sequences of bytes that correspond to the strings that are to be matched. These representations are then combined and passed to feed-forward nodes, finally leading to a classification decision. We present the results of a wide-ranging evaluation on the performance of the proposed method, using a large dataset collected from the GeoNames gazetteer. These results show that the proposed method can significantly outperform individual similarity metrics from previous studies, as well as previous methods based on supervised machine learning for combining multiple metrics.