7,263 research outputs found
A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter
Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are
central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic
identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been
explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network
platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of
tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and
real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained
significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing
with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and
context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall
picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the
prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We
first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing
Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then
structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency
is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies
adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two
related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest
recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur
Multivariate Spatiotemporal Hawkes Processes and Network Reconstruction
There is often latent network structure in spatial and temporal data and the
tools of network analysis can yield fascinating insights into such data. In
this paper, we develop a nonparametric method for network reconstruction from
spatiotemporal data sets using multivariate Hawkes processes. In contrast to
prior work on network reconstruction with point-process models, which has often
focused on exclusively temporal information, our approach uses both temporal
and spatial information and does not assume a specific parametric form of
network dynamics. This leads to an effective way of recovering an underlying
network. We illustrate our approach using both synthetic networks and networks
constructed from real-world data sets (a location-based social media network, a
narrative of crime events, and violent gang crimes). Our results demonstrate
that, in comparison to using only temporal data, our spatiotemporal approach
yields improved network reconstruction, providing a basis for meaningful
subsequent analysis --- such as community structure and motif analysis --- of
the reconstructed networks
Language in Our Time: An Empirical Analysis of Hashtags
Hashtags in online social networks have gained tremendous popularity during
the past five years. The resulting large quantity of data has provided a new
lens into modern society. Previously, researchers mainly rely on data collected
from Twitter to study either a certain type of hashtags or a certain property
of hashtags. In this paper, we perform the first large-scale empirical analysis
of hashtags shared on Instagram, the major platform for hashtag-sharing. We
study hashtags from three different dimensions including the temporal-spatial
dimension, the semantic dimension, and the social dimension. Extensive
experiments performed on three large-scale datasets with more than 7 million
hashtags in total provide a series of interesting observations. First, we show
that the temporal patterns of hashtags can be categorized into four different
clusters, and people tend to share fewer hashtags at certain places and more
hashtags at others. Second, we observe that a non-negligible proportion of
hashtags exhibit large semantic displacement. We demonstrate hashtags that are
more uniformly shared among users, as quantified by the proposed hashtag
entropy, are less prone to semantic displacement. In the end, we propose a
bipartite graph embedding model to summarize users' hashtag profiles, and rely
on these profiles to perform friendship prediction. Evaluation results show
that our approach achieves an effective prediction with AUC (area under the ROC
curve) above 0.8 which demonstrates the strong social signals possessed in
hashtags.Comment: WWW 201
Latent Self-Exciting Point Process Model for Spatial-Temporal Networks
We propose a latent self-exciting point process model that describes
geographically distributed interactions between pairs of entities. In contrast
to most existing approaches that assume fully observable interactions, here we
consider a scenario where certain interaction events lack information about
participants. Instead, this information needs to be inferred from the available
observations. We develop an efficient approximate algorithm based on
variational expectation-maximization to infer unknown participants in an event
given the location and the time of the event. We validate the model on
synthetic as well as real-world data, and obtain very promising results on the
identity-inference task. We also use our model to predict the timing and
participants of future events, and demonstrate that it compares favorably with
baseline approaches.Comment: 20 pages, 6 figures (v3); 11 pages, 6 figures (v2); previous version
appeared in the 9th Bayesian Modeling Applications Workshop, UAI'1
Location Prediction: Communities Speak Louder than Friends
Humans are social animals, they interact with different communities of
friends to conduct different activities. The literature shows that human
mobility is constrained by their social relations. In this paper, we
investigate the social impact of a person's communities on his mobility,
instead of all friends from his online social networks. This study can be
particularly useful, as certain social behaviors are influenced by specific
communities but not all friends. To achieve our goal, we first develop a
measure to characterize a person's social diversity, which we term `community
entropy'. Through analysis of two real-life datasets, we demonstrate that a
person's mobility is influenced only by a small fraction of his communities and
the influence depends on the social contexts of the communities. We then
exploit machine learning techniques to predict users' future movement based on
their communities' information. Extensive experiments demonstrate the
prediction's effectiveness.Comment: ACM Conference on Online Social Networks 2015, COSN 201
Who are Like-minded: Mining User Interest Similarity in Online Social Networks
In this paper, we mine and learn to predict how similar a pair of users'
interests towards videos are, based on demographic (age, gender and location)
and social (friendship, interaction and group membership) information of these
users. We use the video access patterns of active users as ground truth (a form
of benchmark). We adopt tag-based user profiling to establish this ground
truth, and justify why it is used instead of video-based methods, or many
latent topic models such as LDA and Collaborative Filtering approaches. We then
show the effectiveness of the different demographic and social features, and
their combinations and derivatives, in predicting user interest similarity,
based on different machine-learning methods for combining multiple features. We
propose a hybrid tree-encoded linear model for combining the features, and show
that it out-performs other linear and treebased models. Our methods can be used
to predict user interest similarity when the ground-truth is not available,
e.g. for new users, or inactive users whose interests may have changed from old
access data, and is useful for video recommendation. Our study is based on a
rich dataset from Tencent, a popular service provider of social networks, video
services, and various other services in China
DeepCity: A Feature Learning Framework for Mining Location Check-ins
Online social networks being extended to geographical space has resulted in
large amount of user check-in data. Understanding check-ins can help to build
appealing applications, such as location recommendation. In this paper, we
propose DeepCity, a feature learning framework based on deep learning, to
profile users and locations, with respect to user demographic and location
category prediction. Both of the predictions are essential for social network
companies to increase user engagement. The key contribution of DeepCity is the
proposal of task-specific random walk which uses the location and user
properties to guide the feature learning to be specific to each prediction
task. Experiments conducted on 42M check-ins in three cities collected from
Instagram have shown that DeepCity achieves a superior performance and
outperforms other baseline models significantly
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