Geo-Conquesting Based on Graph Analysis for Crowdsourced Metatrails from Mobile Sensing

This article investigates graph analysis for intelligent marketing in smart cities, where metatrails are crowdsourced by mobile sensing for marketing strategies. Unlike most works that focused on client sides, this study is intended for market planning, from the perspective of enterprises. Several novel crowdsourced features based on metatrails, including hotspot networks, crowd transitions, affinity subnetworks, and sequential visiting patterns, are discussed in the article. These smart footprints can reflect crowd preferences and the topology of a site of interest. Marketers can utilize such information for commercial resource planning and deployment. Simulations were conducted to demonstrate the performance. At the end, this study also discusses different scenarios for practical geo-conquesting applications.