Predicting encounter and colocation events in metropolitan areas

Despite an extensive literature has been devoted to mine and model mobility features, forecasting where, when and whom people will encounter/colocate still deserve further research efforts. Forecasting people’s encounter and colocation features is the key point for the success of many applications ranging from epidemiology to the design of new networking paradigms and services such as delay tolerant and opportunistic networks. While many algorithms which rely on both mobility and social information have been proposed, we propose a novel encounter and colocation predictive model which predicts user’s encounter and colocation events and their features by exploiting the spatio-temporal regularity in the history of these events. We adopt a weighted features Bayesian predictor and evaluate its accuracy on two large scales WiFi and cellular datasets. Results show that our approach could improve prediction accuracy w.r.t standard näıve Bayesian and some of the state-of-the-art predictors.