Extracting Mobile Behavioral Patterns with the Distant N-Gram Topic Model

Mining patterns of human behavior from large-scale mobile phone data has potential to understand certain phenomena in society. The study of such human-centric massive datasets requires new mathematical models. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic topic model that we call the distant n-gram topic model (DNTM) to address the problem of learning long duration human location sequences. The DNTM is based on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We define the generative process for the model, derive the inference procedure and evaluate our model on real mobile data. We consider two different real-life human datasets, collected by mobile phone locations, the first considering GPS locations and the second considering cell tower connections. The DNTM successfully discovers topics on the two datasets. Finally, the DNTM is compared to LDA by considering log-likelihood performance on unseen data, showing the predictive power of the model on unseen data. We find that the DNTM consistantly outperforms LDA as the sequence length increases.