Modeling User Activity Space from Location-Based Social Media: A Case Study of Weibo

Abstract

Activity space studies are beneficial for discovering meaningful activity patterns and providing a deeper understanding of human behaviors. There is insufficient research, however, on how reliable location-based social media (LBSM) is as a new data source for discovering user activity spaces. To this end, this research calculates four external and three internal activity space indicators based on Weibo data from three Chinese cities. We compared the strengths and weaknesses of these indicators for approximating user activity spaces from LBSM data with a low sampling resolution. We also tested how different amounts of check-in data affect the calculation of these activity space indicators. The results provide a useful reference for future experimental design in human activity modeling based on social media data.