Abstract
Abstract. Outdoor air pollution has become a more and more serious issue over recent years (He, 2014). Urban air quality is measured at air monitoring stations. Building air monitoring stations requires land, incurs costs and entails skilled technicians to maintain a station. Many countries do not have any monitoring stations and even lack any means to monitor air quality. Recent years, the social media could be used to monitor air quality dynamically (Wang, 2015; Mei, 2014). However, no studies have investigated the inter-correlations between real-space and cyberspace by examining variation in micro-blogging behaviors relative to changes in daily air quality. Thus, existing methods of monitoring AQI using micro-blogging data shows a high degree of error between real AQI and air quality as inferred from social media messages. In this paper, we introduce a new geo-targeted social media analytic method to (1) investigate the dynamic relationship between air pollution-related posts on Sina Weibo and daily AQI values; (2) apply Gradient Tree Boosting, a machine learning method, to monitor the dynamics of AQI using filtered social media messages. Our results expose the spatiotemporal relationships between social media messages and real-world environmental changes as well suggesting new ways to monitor air pollution using social media.
Highlights
Two types of data were used in this study
To extract data content about the dynamics of air quality in the real world, we categorized the microblogs into three types: (1) Retweet Messages
We explored the relationship between the temporal trends in individual messages and the dynamic changes of the daily air quality index (AQI) by using the Pearson correlation coefficient
Summary
To extract data content about the dynamics of air quality in the real world, we categorized the microblogs into three types:. The term, retweet messages, refers to those microblogs reposting the contents of other microblogs (Suh, 2010). Mobile app messages are microblogs posted by app users. Many people install air pollution apps on their mobile phones. These apps broadcast air pollution updates containing the AQI every few hours and allow users to post these updates on Sina Weibo directly. Original individual messages are created by social media users expressing their own personal opinions. Individual users mentioned air pollution keywords in their individual messages in relation to air quality around their own immediate surroundings
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