Graph-based Method for App Usage Prediction with Attributed Heterogeneous Network Embedding

Smartphones and applications have become widespread more and more. Thus, using the hardware and software of users’ mobile phones, we can get a large amount of personal data, in which a large part is about the user’s application usage patterns. By transforming and extracting these data, we can get user preferences, and provide personalized services and improve the experience for users. In a detailed way, studying application usage pattern benefits a variety of advantages such as precise bandwidth allocation, App launch acceleration, etc. However, the first thing to achieve the above advantages is to predict the next application accurately. In this paper, we propose AHNEAP, a novel network embedding based framework for predicting the next App to be used by characterizing the context information before one specific App being launched. AHNEAP transforms the historical App usage records in physical spaces to a large attributed heterogeneous network which contains three node types, three edges, and several attributes like App type, the day of the week. Then, the representation learning process is conducted. Finally, the App usage prediction problem was defined as a link prediction problem, realized by a simple neural network. Experiments on the LiveLab project dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework which outperforms the three baseline methods for each tested user.