31,202 research outputs found
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
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
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
Academic Performance and Behavioral Patterns
Identifying the factors that influence academic performance is an essential
part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance
of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. Because
most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small
sample sizes, there is currently no quantification of the interplay of these
factors. Here, we study the academic performance among a cohort of 538
undergraduate students forming a single, densely connected social network. Our
work is based on data collected using smartphones, which the students used as
their primary phones for two years. The availability of multi-channel data from
a single population allows us to directly compare the explanatory power of
individual and social characteristics. We find that the most informative
indicators of performance are based on social ties and that network indicators
result in better model performance than individual characteristics (including
both personality and class attendance). We confirm earlier findings that class
attendance is the most important predictor among individual characteristics.
Finally, our results suggest the presence of strong homophily and/or peer
effects among university students
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