The customer base is the most valuable resource to E-commerce companies. A comprehensive understanding of customers’ preferences and behavior is crucial to developing good marketing strategies, in order to achieve optimal customer lifetime values (CLVs). For example, by exploring customer behavior patterns, given a marketing plan with a limited budget, a set of potential customers is able to be identified to maximize profit. In other words, personalized campaigns at the right time and in the right place can be treated as the last stage of consumption. Moreover, effective future purchase estimation and recommendation help guide the customer to the up-selling stage. The proposed willing-to-pay prediction model (W2P) exploits the transaction data to predict customer payment behavior based on a probabilistic graphical model, which provides semantic explanation of the estimated results and deals with the sparsity of payment data from each customer. Existing work in this domain ranks the customers by their probabilities of purchase in different conditions. However, the customer with the highest purchase probability does not necessarily spend the most. Therefore, we propose a CLV maximization algorithm based on the prediction results. In addition, we improve the model by behavioral segmentation wherein we group the customers by payment behaviors to reduce the size of the offline models and enhance the accuracy for low-frequency customers. The experiment results show that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in purchase behavior prediction.

The improvement of collision avoidance for ship navigation in encounter situation is an important topic in maritime traffic safety. Most research on maritime collision avoidance has focused on planning a safe path for a ship to keep away from the approaching ship under the requirements of the International Regulations for Preventing Collision at Sea (COLREGs). However, the specific anti-collision actions are actually carried out by the navigators' own experience according to the local encounter situation.

With the advances in the development of mobile payments, a huge amount of payment data are collected by banks. User payment data offer a good dataset to depict customer behavior patterns. A comprehensive understanding of customers' purchase behavior is crucial to developing good marketing strategies, which may trigger much greater purchase amounts. For example, by exploring customer behavior patterns, given a target store, a set of potential customers is able to be identified.

Thanks for the common use of Automatic Identification System (AIS) network has made a large number of the maritime traffic data to be available. Ships equipped with AIS automatically exchange navigational information with nearby ships and terrestrial AIS receivers to facilitate the tracking and monitoring of ships' location and movement for collision avoidance and control. Obviously, with increasing amount of maritime shipping traffic, the navigational collisions are one of the growing safety concerns in maritime traffic situation awareness. To understand the collision situations can help the maritime traffic managers to improve the safety control of maritime traffic. However, it is difficult to statistically analyze such collision due to the number of collected real cases of collisions are relatively low within a short period of time. To overcome the problem of low sample size, we discover traffic conflict from data collected by AIS network to substitute the real collision. Given a set of maritime traffic data collected from AIS network, we try to discover ships' movements that have conflict behaviors and these behaviors may bring a possible collision if they do not take any evasive action. We propose a framework of Clustering-and-Detection to automatically discover the clusters of conflict trajectory from AIS trajectory data in an unsupervised way. Based on real AIS data, the experimental results show that the proposed framework is able to effectively discover sets of trajectory with conflict situation from maritime AIS traffic data. The statistical analysis on the discovered sets of conflict trajectory is able to provide useful knowledge for maritime traffic monitoring.

Collision-free is one of the major safety concerns for maritime traffic management. To analyze the collision data and understand the cause of the collision can contribute the improvement of the maritime traffic safety and management. However, the real collisions is not always available to analyze. Based on a massive AIS trajectory data collected, we focus on mining the ships' movement behaviors those may bring a possible collision if they do not take any avoidance, called Maritime Traffic Conflict. Even though the maritime traffic conflict is a non-accident incident, the movement behaviors of maritime traffic conflict may have the similar behaviors of navigational collision for analysis. Thus, we propose ConflictFinder to provide a framework for maritime traffic conflict mining. Different from existing methods those focus on detecting the conflicts between two ships in a restricted water way, we discover the conflicts occurred by multi-ships in open sea. For analysis of maritime traffic conflicts, a prototype of ConflictFinder is implemented which helps with gaining a better understanding of traffic conflicts discovered and can be applied to the improvement of maritime traffic safety evaluation and management.

With the popularity of social media (e.g., Facebook and Flicker), users can easily share their check-in records and photos during their trips. In view of the huge number of user historical mobility records in social media, we aim to discover travel experiences to facilitate trip planning. When planning a trip, users always have specific preferences regarding their trips. Instead of restricting users to limited query options such as locations, activities, or time periods, we consider arbitrary text descriptions as keywords about personalized requirements. Moreover, a diverse and representative set of recommended travel routes is needed. Prior works have elaborated on mining and ranking existing routes from check-in data. To meet the need for automatic trip organization, we claim that more features of Places of Interest (POIs) should be extracted. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an efficient Keyword-aware Representative Travel Route framework that uses knowledge extraction from users' historical mobility records and social interactions. Explicitly, we have designed a keyword extraction module to classify the POI-related tags, for effective matching with query keywords. We have further designed a route reconstruction algorithm to construct route candidates that fulfill the requirements. To provide befitting query results, we explore Representative Skyline concepts, that is, the Skyline routes which best describe the trade-offs among different POI features. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms, we have conducted extensive experiments on real location-based social network datasets, and the experiment results show that our methods do indeed demonstrate good performance compared to state-of-the-art works.

With the popularity of social media (e.g., Facebook and Flicker), users could easily share their check-in records and photos during their trips. In view of the huge amount of check-in data and photos in social media, we intend to discover travel experiences to facilitate trip planning. Prior works have been elaborated on mining and ranking existing travel routes from check-in data. We observe that when planning a trip, users may have some keywords about preference on his/her trips. Moreover, a diverse set of travel routes is needed. To provide a diverse set of travel routes, we claim that more features of Places of Interests (POIs) should be extracted. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a Keyword-aware Skyline Travel Route (KSTR) framework that use knowledge extraction from historical mobility records and the user's social interactions. Explicitly, we model the "Where, When, Who" issues by featurizing the geographical mobility pattern, temporal influence and social influence. Then we propose a keyword extraction module to classify the POI-related tags automatically into different types, for effective matching with query keywords. We further design a route reconstruction algorithm to construct route candidates that fulfill the query inputs. To provide diverse query results, we explore Skyline concepts to rank routes. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms, we have conducted extensive experiments on real location-based social network datasets, and the experimental results show that KSTR does indeed demonstrate good performance compared to state-of-the-art works.

Recently, with the advent of location-based social networking services (LBSNs), travel planning and location-aware information recommendation based on LBSNs have attracted much research attention. In this paper, we study the impact of social relations hidden in LBSNs, i.e., The social influence of friends. We propose a new social influence-based user recommender framework (SIR) to discover the potential value from reliable users (i.e., Close friends and travel experts). Explicitly, our SIR framework is able to infer influential users from an LBSN. We claim to capture the interactions among virtual communities, physical mobility activities and time effects to infer the social influence between user pairs. Furthermore, we intend to model the propagation of influence using diffusion-based mechanism. Moreover, we have designed a dynamic fusion framework to integrate the features mined into a united follow probability score. Finally, our SIR framework provides personalized top-k user recommendations for individuals. To evaluate the recommendation results, we have conducted extensive experiments on real datasets (i.e., The Go Walla dataset). The experimental results show that the performance of our SIR framework is better than the state-of the-art user recommendation mechanisms in terms of accuracy and reliability.

In this paper, given a spatial range Q and a set of query points specified by users, the goal of this paper is to return the travel routes that fulfill two requirements: 1.) travel routes should contain all those query points specified, and 2.) travel routes should be within the spatial range Q. Furthermore, we claim that each query point may have its proper visiting time. As such, the travel routes should go through these query points at their corresponding proper visiting time. To avoid some redundant information in the travel routes, we utilize the skyline concept to retrieve travel routes with more diversity. Specifically, in our paper, we consider some factors, such as the visiting time information of POIs and the set of query points, in retrieving travel routes. These factors could be mapped into dimensional spaces. Then, each travel route is viewed as a data point in the dimensional space. Thus, skyline data points (referred to as skyline travel routes) are returned as the query result. Skyline travel routes could provide more diversity in the query result of trip route recommendations. To evaluate our proposed methods, we conducted extensive experiments on real datasets. The experimental results show that skyline travel routes indeed provide more diversity in the query result. In addition, we evaluate the efficiency of retrieving skyline travel routes.

Mining trajectory data has been attracting significant interest in the last years. By analyzing trajectory data, we are able to discover the movement behavior and location-aware knowledge, and then develop many interesting applications such as movement behavior discovery, location prediction, traffic analysis, and so on. However, trajectory data mining is a challenge task because of the trajectory data is available with uncertainty. Furthermore, discovering the valuable knowledge from maritime trajectory is made even more difficult due to the maritime area is a free moving space. Unlike the vehicles' movements are constrained by road networks, there is no such a sea route for ships to follow in maritime area. A ship's movement may not exactly repeat the same trajectory even the ship has the similar movement behavior with others. In this work, Route Miner system provides a framework of ship route mining for maritime traffic analysis. Given a set of ship trajectories in a maritime area, Route Miner explore the movement behavior from those massive trajectories in a free moving space. Then, ship routes are detected based on those behavioral pattern. Finally, the system generates a set of ships routes to provide operators a better understanding from ship trajectory data. We conduct the experiments on real maritime trajectories to show the effectiveness of proposed Route Miner. In the future, Route Miner is going to serve as the photo type for exploring the solutions of the challenges those related to anomaly detection and traffic management in the maritime domain.