Smart Geo-fencing with Location Sensitive Product Affinity
Published in 25th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM SIGSPATIAL 2017) (Full Paper Acceptance Rate: 18%), 2017
Recommended citation: Ankur Garg, Sunav Choudhary, Payal Bajaj, Sweta Agrawal, Abhishek Kedia, and Shubham Agrawal. 2017. Smart Geo-fencing with Location Sensitive Product Affinity. In Proceedings of SIGSPATIAL’17, Los Angeles Area, CA, USA, November 7–10, 2017, 10 pages. http://ankurgarg101.github.io/files/smart_geofencing_paper_sigspatial.pdf
Abstract
Geo-fencing is a location based service that allows sending of messages to users who enter/exit a specified geographical area, known as a geo-fence. Today, it has become one of the popular location based mobile marketing strategies. However, the process of designing geo-fences is presently manual, i.e. retailer must specify the location and the radius of area around it to setup the geo-fences. Moreover, this process does not consider the user’s preference towards the targeted product/service and thus, can compromise his/her experience of the app that sends these communications. We attempt to solve this problem by presenting a novel end-to-end system for automated design of affinity based smart geo-fences. Affinity towards a product/service refers to the user’s interest in a product/service. Our unique formulation to estimate affinity, using historical app usage data, is sensitive to a user’s location and thus, the affinity is termed as location sensitive product affinity (LSPA). The geo-fence logic tries to capture contiguous groups of locations where the affinity high. Experiments on real world e-commerce dataset reveals that geo-fences designed by our approach performs significantly better at accurately targeting the users who are interested in a product. We thus show that, using historical app usage data, geo-fences can be designed in an automated manner and can help enterprises target interested users with better accuracy as compared to the present industry practices.
Recommended citation: Ankur Garg, Sunav Choudhary, Payal Bajaj, Sweta Agrawal, Abhishek Kedia, and Shubham Agrawal. 2017. Smart Geo-fencing with Location Sensitive Product Affinity. In Proceedings of SIGSPATIAL’17, Los Angeles Area, CA, USA, November 7–10, 2017, 10 pages.