As Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have become widely used by users, understanding user engagement and predicting user churn are essential to the maintainability of the services. In this thesis, we conduct a quantitative analysis to understand user engagement patterns exhibited both offline and online in LBSNs. We employ two large-scale datasets which consist of 1.3 million and 62 million users with 5.3 million reviews and 19 million tips in Yelp and Foursquare, respectively. We discover that users keep traveling to diverse locations where they have not reviewed before, which is in contrast to “human life” analogy in real life, an initial exploration followed by exploitation of existing preferences. Interestingly, we find users who eventually leave the community show dist...[ Read more ]

As Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have become widely used by users, understanding user engagement and predicting user churn are essential to the maintainability of the services. In this thesis, we conduct a quantitative analysis to understand user engagement patterns exhibited both offline and online in LBSNs. We employ two large-scale datasets which consist of 1.3 million and 62 million users with 5.3 million reviews and 19 million tips in Yelp and Foursquare, respectively. We discover that users keep traveling to diverse locations where they have not reviewed before, which is in contrast to “human life” analogy in real life, an initial exploration followed by exploitation of existing preferences. Interestingly, we find users who eventually leave the community show distinct engagement patterns even with their first ten reviews in various facets, e.g., geographical, venue-specific, linguistic, and social aspects. Based on these observations, we construct predictive models to detect potential churners. We then demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed features in the churn prediction. Our findings of geographical exploration and online interactions of users enhance our understanding of human mobility based on reviews, and provide important implications for venue recommendations and churn prediction.