Why people go to unfamiliar areas? Analysis of mobility pattern based on users' familiarity

Human mobility analysis with Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data is the basis of personalized point-of-interest (POI) recommendations or location-aware advertisements. In addition to personal preference and spatiotemporal factors such as time and distance, personal context has a strong influence on mobility. An individual's familiarity with an area is an interesting context because it can bias the influence of certain factors. For example, the mobility patterns of two persons who have similar preferences are different when their familiarity with the area is different, even in the same area. In this paper, we analyze familiarity's effect on mobility patterns by using over 1.4 million check-ins gathered from Foursquare. The analysis indicates that there is a skewness of the visit time and visited venue distribution in unfamiliar areas. For instance, people go to unfamiliar areas on weekends; and venues for cultural experiences, such as museums, strongly contribute to the motivation of visit.