US Patent 10187343 Location data for defining places and traffic

In one embodiment, a computing device selects a number of location updates from users which corresponds to a place. Each location update includes data indicating a geographic location that a user was at, and a time corresponding to when the user was at the geographic location. The computing device selects a first subset of the location updates which have geographic locations within a particular geographic area. For each location update in the first subset, the computing device determines a corresponding user and time. The computing device selects a second subset of location updates, each location update in the second subset corresponding to a user from the first subset, and a time within a threshold time of the time of the location update in the first subset. The computing device generates a probability map based on a distribution of geographic locations corresponding to the location updates in the second subset.