Geo-Social Media Analytics

Cheng-Te Li, Hsun-Ping Hsieh

Abstract: With the maturity of wireless communication techniques, GPS-equipped mobile devices become ubiquitous, and location-acquisition technologies and services are flourishing. These location applications as well as mobile devices, developed and combined with the social networking services, foster the emergence of geo-social media, a novel type of user-generated geo-social data, such as data from Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. In geo-social media, social connections and geo-location information of users are the essential elements, which keep track of their user interactions and their spatial-temporal activities. While social interactions are depicted by online network structures, and geographical activities are usually represented as check-in records. Due to the pervasive mobility of users, a huge amount of user-generated geo-social data is rapidly generated. Such big geo-social data not only collectively represents diverse kinds of real-world human activities, but also serves as a handy resource for various geo-social applications. In this tutorial, we aim to present the recent advances on geo-social media analytics in a systematic manner, consisting of five parts: (a) properties of geo-social networks, which unveil the relationships between human mobility and social structures; (b) geo-social link prediction, using geographical, mobility, activity features with various inference models; (c) location recommendation, leveraging personal, social, contextual, geographical, and content information; (d) geo-social influence propagation and maximization; and (e) connecting online and offline social networks for revisiting conventional SNA wisdom and developing applications that bridge virtual and physical social worlds. We also highlight the unsolved problems for each of the aforementioned topics and future directions of geo-social media analytics. We believe this tutorial can benefit the research communities of mobile web, data mining, information retrieval, social network analysis, recommender system, and marketing and advertisement.