Location-based Social Network Data Research Articles

Role of Big Data in the Development of Smart City by Analyzing the Density of Residents in Shanghai

In recent decades, a large amount of research has been carried out to analyze location-based social network data to highlight their application. These location-based social network datasets can be used to propose models and techniques that can analyze and reproduce the spatiotemporal structures and symmetries in user activities as well as density estimations. In the current study, different density estimation techniques are utilized to analyze the check-in frequency of users in more detail from location-based social network dataset acquired from Sina-Weibo, also referred as Weibo, over a specific period in 10 different districts of Shanghai, China. The aim of this study is to analyze the density of users in Shanghai city from geolocation data of Weibo as well as to compare their density through univariate and bivariate density estimation techniques; i.e., point density and kernel density estimation (KDE) respectively. The main findings of the study include the following: (i) characteristics of users’ spatial behavior, the center of activity based on their check-ins, (ii) the feasibility of check-in data to explain the relationship between users and social media, and (iii) the presentation of evident results for regulatory or managing authorities for urban planning. The current study shows that the point density and kernel density estimation. KDE methods provide useful insights for modeling spatial patterns using geo-spatial dataset. Finally, we can conclude that, by utilizing the KDE technique, we can examine the check-in behavior in more detail for an individual as well as broader patterns in the population as a whole for the development of smart city. The purpose of this article is to figure out the denser places so that the authorities can divide the mobility of people from the same routes or at least they can control the situation from any further inconvenience.

A hybrid analysis of LBSN data to early detect anomalies in crowd dynamics

Undoubtedly, Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs) provide an interesting source of geo-located data that we have previously used to obtain patterns of the dynamics of crowds throughout urban areas. According to our previous results, activity in LBSNs reflects the real activity in the city. Therefore, unexpected behaviors in the social media activity are a trustful evidence of unexpected changes of the activity in the city. In this paper we introduce a hybrid solution to early detect these changes based on applying a combination of two approaches, the use of entropy analysis and clustering techniques, on the data gathered from LBSNs. In particular, we have performed our experiments over a data set collected from Instagram for seven months in New York City, obtaining promising results.

Visualization, Spatiotemporal Patterns, and Directional Analysis of Urban Activities Using Geolocation Data Extracted from LBSN

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have rapidly prevailed in China with the increase in smart devices use, which has provided a wide range of opportunities to analyze urban behavior in terms of the use of LBSNs. In a LBSN, users socialize by sharing their location (also referred to as “geolocation”) in the form of a tweet (also referred to as a “check-in”), which contains information in the form of, but is not limited to, text, audio, video, etc., which records the visited place, movement patterns, and activities performed (e.g., eating, living, working, or leisure). Understanding the user’s activities and behavior in space and time using LBSN datasets can be achieved by archiving the daily activities, movement patterns, and social media behavior patterns, thus representing the user’s daily routine. The current research observing and analyzing urban activities behavior was often supported by the volunteered sharing of geolocation and the activity performed in space and time. The objective of this research was to observe the spatiotemporal and directional trends and the distribution differences of urban activities at the city and district levels using LBSN data. The density was estimated, and the spatiotemporal trend of activities was observed, using kernel density estimation (KDE); for spatial regression analysis, geographically weighted regression (GWR) analysis was used to observe the relationship between different activities in the study area. Finally, for the directional analysis, to observe the principle orientation and direction, and the spatiotemporal movement and extension trends, a standard deviational ellipse (SDE) analysis was used. The results of the study show that women were more inclined to use social media compared with men. However, the activities of male users were different during weekdays and weekends compared to those of female users. The results of the directional analysis at the district level reflect the change in the trajectory and spatiotemporal dynamics of activities. The directional analysis at the district level reveals its fine spatial structure in comparison to the whole city level. Therefore, LBSN can be considered as a supplementary and reliable source of social media big data for observing urban activities and behavior within a city in space and time.

A New Approach to Refining Land Use Types: Predicting Point-of-Interest Categories Using Weibo Check-in Data

The information of land use plays an important role in urban planning and optimizing the allocation of resources. However, traditional land use classification is imprecise. For instance, the type of commercial land is highly filled with the categories of shopping, eating, etc. The number of mixed-use lands is increasingly growing nowadays, and these lands sometimes are too mixed to be well investigated by conventional approaches such as remote sensing technology. To address this issue, we used a new social sensing approach to classify land use according to human mobility and activity patterns. Previous studies used other social sensing approaches to predict land use types at the parcel or the area level, whilst fine-grained point-of-interest (POI)-level land use data are likely to more useful in urban planning. To abridge this research gap, we proposed a new social sensing approach dedicated to classifying land use at a finer scale (i.e., POI-level or building level) according to human mobility and activity patterns reflected by location-based social network (LBSN) data. Specifically, we firstly investigated spatial and temporal patterns of human mobility and activity behavior using check-in data from a popular Chinese LBSN named Sina Weibo and subsequently applied those patterns to predicting the category of POI to refine urban land use classification in Guangzhou, China. In this study, we applied three classification methods (i.e., naive Bayes, support vector machines, and random forest) to recognize category of a certain POI by spatial and temporal features of human mobility and activity behavior as well as POIs’ locational characteristics. Random forest outperformed the other two methods and obtained an overall accuracy of 72.21%. Apart from that, we compared the results of the different rules in filtering check-in samples. The comparison results show that a reasonable rule to select samples is essential for predicting the category of POI. Moreover, the approach proposed in this study can be potentially applied to identifying functions of buildings according to visitors’ mobility and activity behavior and buildings’ locational characteristics.

Sentiment Severity on Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) Data of Natural disasters

Social media emerged as one of the key components to reach disaster affected people, as they supplement planning and operational coordination. Sentiment analysis was expended to identify, extract or characterize subjective information, such as opinions, expressed in a tweet. The sentiment expressed is analyzed and is classified as positive or negative sentiment, which is not versatile enough to capture the exact sentiment conveyed by the user. Opinion mining is a machine learning process used to extract information conveyed by the user in the form of text. In this paper, the lexical analysis to sentiment analysis of twitter data is employed. Conventionally, the sentiment is conveyed using the polarity of the data but in this paper, sentiment intensity is employed to convey the sentiments. Performing sentiment analysis on tweets gives us the sentiment intensity conveyed by the user, which in turn is used to calculate the severity of the disaster event specified by the user. Further, it is also used to classify the tweets based on their severity. This paper proposes a methodology to extract relevant sentiment information from Location Based Social Network (LBSN) and suggests a unique scale to classify this information to help disaster management authority.

Location-Based Social Network’s Data Analysis and Spatio-Temporal Modeling for the Mega City of Shanghai, China

The aim of the current study is to analyze and extract the useful patterns from Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data in Shanghai, China, using different temporal and spatial analysis techniques, along with specific check-in venue categories. This article explores the applications of LBSN data by examining the association between time, frequency of check-ins, and venue classes, based on users’ check-in behavior and the city’s characteristics. The information regarding venue classes is created and categorized by using the nature of physical locations. We acquired the geo-location information from one of the most famous Chinese microblogs called Sina-Weibo (Weibo). The extracted data are translated into the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) format, and after analysis the results are presented in the form of statistical graphs, tables, and spatial heatmaps. SPSS is used for temporal analysis, and Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is applied based on users’ check-ins with the help of ArcMap and OpenStreetMap for spatial analysis. The findings show various patterns, including more frequent use of LBSN while visiting entertainment and shopping locations, a substantial number of check-ins from educational institutions, and that the density extends to suburban areas mainly because of educational institutions and residential areas. Through analytical results, the usage patterns based on hours of the day, days of the week, and for an entire six months, including by gender, venue category, and frequency distribution of the classes, as well as check-in density all over Shanghai city, are thoroughly demonstrated.

RETRACTED: Spatiotemporal Analysis of Tourists and Residents in Shanghai Based on Location-Based Social Network’s Data from Weibo

The aim of this study is to analyze and compare the patterns of behavior of tourists and residents from Location-Based Social Network (LBSN) data in Shanghai, China using various spatiotemporal analysis techniques at different venue categories. The paper presents the applications of location-based social network’s data by exploring the patterns in check-ins over a period of six months. We acquired the geo-location information from one of the most famous Chinese microblogs called Sina-Weibo (Weibo). The extracted data is translated into the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) format, and compared with the help of temporal statistical analysis and kernel density estimation. The venue classification is done by using information regarding the nature of physical locations. The findings reveal that the spatial activities of tourists are more concentrated as compared to those of residents, particularly in downtown, while the residents also visited suburban areas and the temporal activities of tourists varied significantly while the residents’ activities showed relatively stable behavior. These results can be applied in destination management, urban planning, and smart city development.

LBSN2Vec++: Heterogeneous Hypergraph Embedding for Location-Based Social Networks

Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have been widely used as a primary data source for studying the impact of mobility and social relationships on each other. Traditional approaches manually define features to characterize users’ mobility homophily and social proximity, and show that mobility and social features can help friendship and location prediction tasks, respectively. However, these hand-crafted features not only require tedious human efforts, but also are difficult to generalize. Against this background, we propose in this paper LBSN2Vec++, a heterogeneous hypergraph embedding approach designed specifically for LBSN data for automatic feature learning. Specifically, LBSN data intrinsically forms a heterogeneous hypergraph including both user-user homogeneous edges (friendships) and user-time-POI-semantic heterogeneous hyperedges (check-ins). Based on this hypergraph, we first propose a random-walk-with-stay scheme to jointly sample user check-ins and social relationships, and then learn node embeddings from the sampled (hyper)edges by not only preserving the <inline-formula><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$n$</tex-math></inline-formula> -wise node proximity captured by the hyperedges, but also considering embedding space transformation between node domains to fully grasp the complex structural characteristics of the LBSN heterogeneous hypergraph. Using real-world LBSN datasets collected in six cities all over the world, our extensive evaluation shows that LBSN2Vec++ significantly and consistently outperforms both state-of-the-art graph embedding techniques by up to 68 percent and the best-performing hand-crafted features in the literature by up to 70.14 percent on friendship and location prediction tasks.

Extracting Travel Demand for Emergency Situations Using Location-Based Social Network Data

This paper presents the concept of a modular personalized recommendation system, based on existing social networks. The system offers the users in the affected area to evacuate to their nearest best friend or family member who is outside the danger zone. The output of the system is a near real-time OD matrix, which constitutes an input for transportation evacuation models. A preliminary test case shows success in implementing the system on anonymous real location-based social network data.

Stepping Stone Graph

There are many real world applications that require identifying public movements such as identifying movement corridors in cities and most popular paths. If one is not given user trajectories but rather sporadic location data, such as location-based social network data, finding movement related information becomes difficult. Rather than processing all points in a dataset given a query, a clever approach is to construct a graph, based on user locations, and query this graph to answer questions such as shortest paths, most popular paths, and movement corridors. Shortest path graph is one of the popular graphs. However, the shortest path graph can be inefficient and ineffective for analysing movement data, as it calculates the graph edges considering the shortest paths over all the points in a dataset. Therefore, edge sets resulting from shortest path graphs are usually very restrictive and not suitable for movement analysis because of its global view of the dataset. We propose the stepping stone graph, which calculates the graph considering point pairs rather than all points; the stepping stone graph focuses on possible local movements, making it both efficient and effective for location-based social network related data. We demonstrate its capabilities by applying it in the Location-Based Social Network domain and comparing with the shortest path graph. We also compare its properties to a range of other graphs and demonstrate how stepping stone graph relates to Gabriel graph, relative neighbourhood graph, and Delaunay triangulation.

Geography-Aware Inductive Matrix Completion for Personalized Point-of-Interest Recommendation in Smart Cities

With the development of Internet of Things technology, the will to make cities smarter is growing. In the context of smart cities, where people are surrounded by a tremendous number of points of interests (POIs), POI recommendation is of great significance. The massive amount of user check-in data collected by location-based social networks (LBSNs) can help users explore new places via POI recommendations. With rich auxiliary data becomeing available in LBSNs, purely exploiting users’ check-in information for POI recommendation is not sufficient. Although several attempts have been done to employ geographical influence to enhance POI recommendation, they simply use a certain distribution function to measure the geographical influence between POIs, which may lead to biased results. To this end, this article proposes a geography-aware inductive matrix completion (GAIMC) approach for personalized POI recommendation. Specifically, the GAIMC model consists of two parts, including geographic feature extraction via a Gaussian mixture model (GMM) and inductive matrix completion for recommendation. The GAIMC model first captures the geographical influence among users and POIs by the GMM, which can mine clustering information with hierarchical structures based on the users’ check-in data and POIs’ location information. Then, a matrix-completion method called inductive matrix completion, which can incorporate geographical features with the user-POI association metric, is utilized to recommend POIs. The experimental results on two real-world LBSN data sets demonstrate that our proposed model can achieve the best recommendation performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art counterparts.

Analyzing the Spatiotemporal Patterns in Green Spaces for Urban Studies Using Location-Based Social Media Data

Green parks are vital public spaces and play a major role in urban living and well-being. Research on the attractiveness of green parks often relies on traditional techniques, such as questionnaires and in-situ surveys, but these methods are typically insignificant in scale, time-consuming, and expensive, with less transferable results and only site-specific outcomes. This article presents an investigative study that uses location-based social network (LBSN) data to collect spatial and temporal patterns of park visits in Shanghai metropolitan city. During the period from July 2016 to June 2017 in Shanghai, China, we analyzed the spatiotemporal behavior of park visitors for 157 green parks and conducted empirical research on the impacts of green spaces on the public’s behavior in Shanghai. Our main findings show (i) the check-in distribution of users in different green spaces; (ii) the seasonal effects on the public’s behavior toward green spaces; (iii) changes in the number of users based on the hour of the day, the intervals of the day (morning, afternoon, evening), and the day of the week; (iv) interesting user behavior variations that depend on temperature effects; and (v) gender-based differences in the number of green park visitors. These results can be used for the purpose of urban city planning for green spaces by accounting for the preferences of visitors.

Using location-based social network data for activity intensity analysis: A case study of New York City

Location-based social networks (LBSN) are social media sites where users check-in at venues and share content linked to their geo-locations. LBSN, considered to be a novel data source, contain valuable information for urban planners and researchers. While earlier research efforts focused either on disaggregate patterns or aggregate analysis of social and temporal attributes, no attempt has been made to relate the data to transportation planning outcomes. To that extent, the current study employs LBSN service-based data for an aggregate-level transportation planning exercise by developing land-use planning models. Specifically, we employ check-in data aggregated at the census tract level to develop a quantitative model for activity intensity as a function of land use and built-environment attributes for the New York City (NYC) region. A statistical exercise based on clustering of census tracts and negative binomial regression analyses are adopted to analyze the aggregated data. We demonstrate the implications of the estimated models by presenting the spatial aggregation profiling based on the model estimates. The findings provide insights on relative differences of activity engagements across the urban region. The proposed approach thus provides a complementary analysis tool to traditional transportation planning exercises.

On A Novel Adaptive UAV-Mounted Cloudlet-Aided Recommendation System for LBSNs

Location Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have recently emerged as a hot research area. However, the high mobility of LBSN users and the need to quickly provide access points in their interest zones present a unique research challenge. In order to address this challenge, in this paper, we consider the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to be a viable candidate to promptly form a wireless, meshed offloading backbone to support the LBSN data sensing and relevant data computations in the LBSN cloud. In the considered network, UAV-mounted cloudlets are assumed to carry out adaptive recommendation in a distributed manner so as to reduce computing and traffic load. Furthermore, the computational complexity and communication overhead of our proposed adaptive recommendation are analyzed. The effectiveness of the proposed recommendation system in the considered LBSN is evaluated through computer-based simulations. Simulation results demonstrate that our proposal achieves much improved performance compared to conventional methods in terms of accuracy, throughput, and delay.

Annotating semantic tags of locations in location-based social networks

Location-based social networks (LBSNs) have become popular platforms that allow users to share their check-in activities with friends. Annotating semantic tags of locations, as one of the hottest research topics in LBSNs, has attracted considerable attention. Semantic annotation requires sufficient location features to train classifiers. Based on the analysis of LBSN data, we find that users’ check-in activities have similarities that can promote the extraction of location features and improve the accuracy of semantic annotation. However, the existing studies ignored the use of the similarities of users’ check-in activities for extracting suitable location features. Therefore, in this paper, a new location feature, called the similar user pattern (SUP), is first extracted by capturing the similarities among the different users’ check-in activities. Second, annotating semantic tags of locations is treated as a multi-label classification problem. Thus, multi-label semantic annotation with an extreme learning machine (ELM) is proposed, called MSA-ELM. The MSA-ELM algorithm trains a binary ELM classifier for each tag in the tag space to support multi-label classification. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted to demonstrate both the accuracy and efficiency of annotating semantic tags of locations. The experimental results show that the SUP is a proper location feature, and the MSA-ELM algorithm has a good performance for multi-label semantic annotation.

Diversifying Top-k Routes with Spatial Constraints

Trip recommendation has become increasingly popular with the rapid growth of check-in data in location-based social networks. Most existing studies focused only on the popularity of trips. In this paper, we consider further the usability of trip recommendation results through spatial diversification. We thereby formulate a new type of queries named spatial diversified top-k routes (SDkR) query. This type of queries finds k trip routes with the highest popularity, each of which starts at a given starting point, consumes travel time within a given time budget, and passes through points of interest (POIs) of given categories. Any two trip routes returned are diversified to a certain degree defined by the spatial distance between the two routes. We show that the SDkR problem is NP-hard. We propose two precise algorithms to solve the problem. The first algorithm starts with identifying all candidate routes that satisfy the query constraints, and then searches for the k-route combination with the highest popularity. The second algorithm identifies the candidate routes and builds up the optimal k-route combination progressively at the same time. Further, we propose an approximate algorithm to obtain even higher query efficiency with precision bounds. We demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed algorithms on real datasets. Our experimental results show that our algorithms find popular routes with diversified POI locations. Our approximate algorithm saves up to 90% of query time compared with the baseline algorithms.

An efficient location recommendation scheme based on clustering and data fusion

Recently, location-based social networks (LBSNs) have witnessed a significant development, and have attracted millions of mobile users to share their locations and location-related contents. Due to the huge data in LBSNs, it is imperative to design an efficient location recommendation scheme for abundant users. But most of existing works suffer from poor accuracy and efficiency. On one hand, the traditional user-based collaborative filtering (CF) methods only focus on user characteristics, which limit the recommendation accuracy. On the other hand, it is inefficient to traverse all LBSN data in each recommendation. To solve the above issues, this paper proposes a new location recommendation method LC–G–P, in which, Louvain method is adopted to cluster users into several communities; and meanwhile, multiple features including Geographical distance, location Popularity are incorporated into location recommendation. Experiments based on real LBSN dataset illustrate that the proposed recommendation scheme LC–G–P has better accuracy and efficiency, in comparison with the existed typical location recommendation schemes.

Urban Crowd Detection Using SOM, DBSCAN and LBSN Data Entropy: A Twitter Experiment in New York and Madrid

The surfer and the physical location are two important concepts associated with each other in the social network-based localization service. This work consists of studying urban behavior based on location-based social networks (LBSN) data; we focus especially on the detection of abnormal events. The proposed crowd detection system uses the geolocated social network provided by the Twitter application programming interface (API) to automatically detect the abnormal events. The methodology we propose consists of using an unsupervised competitive learning algorithm (self-organizing map (SOM)) and a density-based clustering method (density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise (DBCSAN)) to identify and detect crowds. The second stage is to build the entropy model to determine whether the detected crowds fit into the daily pattern with reference to a spatio-temporal entropy model, or whether they should be considered as evidence that something unusual occurs in the city because of their number, size, location and time of day. To detect an abnormal event in the city, it is sufficient to determine the real entropy model and to compare it with the reference model. For the normal day, the reference model is constructed offline for each time interval. The obtained results confirm the effectiveness of our method used in the first stage (SOM and DBSCAN stage) to detect and identify clusters dynamically, and imitating human activity. These findings also clearly confirm the detection of special days in New York City (NYC), which proves the performance of our proposed model.

Context-aware user preferences prediction on location-based social networks

Recently, the increasing number of mobile users in location-based social networks (LBSNs) has generated large amounts of data, which provides unprecedented opportunities to study mobile user preferences for location recommendation. However, the huge amount of LBSNs data and sparsity problem limited improvements of efficiency and accuracy on mobile user preferences for location recommendation. This paper proposes a context-aware user preferences prediction algorithm for location recommendation on LBSNs. It introduces cloud model and category information into estimating the similarity of users and locations. Furthermore, it predicts user preferences of new locations according to the categories of new locations and user visited. In particular, the algorithm is parallelized with MapReduce framework for significant improvement in efficiency. Experimental results on Foursquare dataset demonstrate the performance gains of the algorithm.

Discovering Memory-Based Preferences for POI Recommendation in Location-Based Social Networks

Point-of-interest (POI) recommendations in location-based social networks (LBSNs) allow online users to discover various POIs for social activities occurring in the near future close to their current locations. Research has verified that people’s preferences regarding POIs are significantly affected by various internal and external contextual factors, which are therefore worth extensive study for POI recommendation. However, although psychological effects have also been demonstrated to be significantly correlated with an individual’s preferences, such effects have been largely ignored in previous studies on POI recommendation. For this paper, inspired by the famous memory theory in psychology, we were interested in whether memory-based preferences could be derived from users’ check-in data. Furthermore, we investigated how to incorporate these memory-based preferences into an effective POI recommendation scheme. Consequently, we refer to Ebbinghaus’s theory on memory, which describes the attenuation of an individual’s memory in the form of a forgetting curve over time. We first created a memory-based POI preference attenuation model and then adopted it to evaluate individuals’ check-ins. Next, we employed the memory-based values of check-ins to calculate the POI preference similarity between users in an LBSN. Finally, based on this memory-based preference similarity, we developed a novel POI recommendation method. We experimentally evaluated the proposed method on a real LBSN data set crawled from Foursquare. The results demonstrate that our method, which incorporates the proposed memory-based preference similarity for POI recommendation, significantly outperforms other methods. In addition, we found the best value of the parameter H in the memory-based preference model that optimizes the recommendation performance. This value of H implies that an individual’s memory usually has an effect on their daily travel choices for approximately 300 days.