EgoMUIL: Enhancing Spatio-temporal User Identity Linkage in Location-Based Social Networks with Ego-Mo Hypergraph

Users tend to own multiple accounts on different location-based social network (LBSN) platforms, and they typically engage with diverse social circles on each platform within the same locations. Consequently, linking these accounts across separate networks becomes essential, playing a critical role in information fusion. Previous works accomplishing user identity linkage (UIL) utilize individual mobility records, which are significantly affected by the issue of data scarcity. In this paper, we propose EgoMUIL, a heterogeneous graph embedding approach specifically devised for information propagation, aiming to alleviate the scarcity problem to some extent. Considering that follow relations of respective networks also hold great significance for the UIL task, we are inspired to enrich individual limited mobility records through follow relations. Our preliminary research reveals that direct common follow relations are quite insufficient. Since the followers with the same spatio-temporal mode tend to have social connections, we first mine closely-related users for each user through topology and locality similarity, generating respective cross-domain ego-networks. Subsequently, we construct a heterogeneous ego-mo hypergraph consisting of mobility and ego-networks. We propose a novel graph convolutional network (GCN)-based approach to learn user representations, which enables the aggregation of information from surrounding nodes, incorporating topological similarities, stay locality similarities, and co-occurrence frequencies. The resulting embeddings provide comprehensive representations of users and locations, capturing their characteristics and relationships across platforms, which further facilitates the UIL task. Our experimental results on real-world check-in datasets from Foursquare and Twitter demonstrate that EgoMUIL outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on the UIL task. Notably, EgoMUIL exhibits superior performance in scenarios involving limited check-in records and follow relations. © 2023 IEEE.