Analysis of Subjective City Happiness Index Based on Large Scale Microblog Data

Kai Wu, Jun Ma, Zhumin Chen, Pengjie Ren

Abstract: City Happiness Index(CHI) is an important societal metric to evaluate the living status of the people in a city. In traditional method, CHI is usually calculated by the combination of other objective city indicators including economy, environment, technology and education. However, happiness is a kind of subjective feeling of people rather than the measurement on how much material wealth people have gotten. Therefore we propose a novel method to evaluate Subjective City Happiness Index(SCHI) by the analysis of public sentiment on microblogs. We carried out the analysis by mining the word distribution of the microblogs in Sina Weibo, which is the largest microblog platform in China. As an application, we used the model to calculate the SCHIs of 36 major cities of China based on 55 million microblogs posted by 0.9 million unique users. Furthermore, we investigated the variety of SCHI with time in different granularities(month, day, hour) in the year 2013.