Estimating mobility of tourists. New Twitter-based procedure

Abstract

Twitter has been actively researched as a human mobility proxy. Tweets can contain two classes of geographical metadata: the location from which a tweet was published, and the place where the tweet is estimated to have been published. Nevertheless, Twitter also presents tweets without any geographical metadata when querying for tweets on a specific location. This study presents a methodology which includes an algorithm for estimating the geographical coordinates to tweets for which Twitter doesn't assign any. Our objective is to determine the origin and the route that a tourist followed, even if Twitter doesn't return geographically identified data. This is carried out through geographical searches of tweets inside a defined area. Once a tweet is found inside an area, but its metadata contains no explicit geographical coordinates, its coordinates are estimated by iteratively performing geographical searches, with a decreasing geographical searching radius. This algorithm was tested in two touristic villages of Madrid (Spain) and a major city in Canada. A set of tweets without geographical coordinates in these areas were found and processed. The coordinates of a subset of them were successfully estimated.