Cluster-based smartphone predictive analytics for application usage and next location prediction

Prediction of app usage and location of smartphone users is an interesting problem and active area of research. Several smartphone sensors such as GPS, accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, camera and Bluetooth make it easier to capture user behavior data and use it for appropriate analysis. However, differences in user behavior and increasing number of apps have made such prediction a challenging problem. In this article, a prediction approach that takes smartphone user behavior into consideration is proposed. The proposed approach is illustrated using data from over 30000 users from a leading IT company in China by first converting data in to recency, frequency, and monetary variables and then performing cluster analysis to capture user behavior. Prediction models are then developed for each cluster using a training dataset and their performance is assessed using a test dataset. The study involves ten different categories of apps and four different regions in Beijing. The proposed app usage prediction and next location prediction approach has provided interesting results.