Social media analysis of car parking behavior using similarity based clustering

Abstract

This paper investigates car parking users’ behaviors from social media perspective using social network based analysis of online communities revealed by mining the associated hashtags in Twitter. We propose a new interpretable community detection approach for mapping user’s car parking behavior by combining Clique, K-core and Girvan–Newman community detection algorithms together with a content-based analysis that exploits polarity, relative frequency and dominant topics. Twitter API was used to collect relevant data by tracking popular car-parking hashtags. A social network graph is constructed using a similarity-based analysis. Finally, interpretable communities are inferred by monitoring the outcomes of clique, K-core and Girvan–Newman community detection algorithms. This interpretability is linked to the aggregation of keywords, hashtags and/or location attributes of the tweet messages as well as a visualization module that enables interaction with users. In parallel, a global trend analysis investigates parking types and Twitter influence with respect to both sentiment polarity and dominant trends (extracted using KeyBERT based approach) is performed. The implementation of this social media analytics has uncovered several aspects associated to car-parking behaviors. A comparison with some state-of-the-art community detection methods has also been carried out and revealed some similarities with our developed approach.