  An increasing amount of location-based service (LBS) data is being
accumulated and helps to study urban dynamics and human mobility. GPS
coordinates and other location indicators are normally low dimensional and only
representing spatial proximity, thus difficult to be effectively utilized by
machine learning models in Geo-aware applications. Existing location embedding
methods are mostly tailored for specific problems that are taken place within
areas of interest. When it comes to the scale of a city or even a country,
existing approaches always suffer from extensive computational cost and
significant data sparsity. Different from existing studies, we propose to learn
representations through a GCN-aided skip-gram model named GCN-L2V by
considering both spatial connection and human mobility. With a flow graph and a
spatial graph, it embeds context information into vector representations.
GCN-L2V is able to capture relationships among locations and provide a better
notion of similarity in a spatial environment. Across quantitative experiments
and case studies, we empirically demonstrate that representations learned by
GCN-L2V are effective. As far as we know, this is the first study that provides
a fine-grained location embedding at the city level using only LBS records.
GCN-L2V is a general-purpose embedding model with high flexibility and can be
applied in down-streaming Geo-aware applications.
