MC$^{2}$2LS: Towards Efficient Collective Location Selection in Competition

Meng Wang, Mengfei Zhao, Hui Li, Jiangtao Cui, Bo Yang, Tao Xue

Abstract: Collective Location Selection (CLS) has received significant research attention in the spatial database community due to its wide range of applications. The CLS problem selects a group of k preferred locations among candidate sites to establish facilities, aimed at collectively attracting the maximum number of users. Existing studies commonly assume every user is located in a fixed position, without considering the competition between peer facilities. Unfortunately, in real markets, users are mobile and choose to patronize from a host of competitors, making traditional techniques unavailable. To this end, this paper presents the first effort on a CLS problem in competition scenarios, called mc$^{2}$2ls, taking into account the mobility factor. Solving mc$^{2}$2ls is a non-trivial task due to its NP-hardness. To overcome the challenge of pruning multi-point users with highly overlapped minimum boundary rectangles (MBRs), we exploit a position count threshold and design two square-based pruning rules. We introduce IQuad-tree, a user-MBR-free index, to benefit the hierarchical and batch-wise properties of the pruning rules. We propose an $(1-\frac{1}{e})$-approximate greedy solution to mc$^{2}$2ls and incorporate a candidate-pruning strategy to further accelerate the computation for handling skewed datasets. Extensive experiments are conducted on real datasets, demonstrating the superiority of our proposed pruning rules and solution compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.