Who, where, when and what: discover spatio-temporal topics for twitter users

  • Authors:

  • Quan Yuan;Gao Cong;Zongyang Ma;Aixin Sun;Nadia Magnenat- Thalmann

  • Affiliations:

  • Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore;Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Micro-blogging services, such as Twitter, and location-based social network applications have generated short text messages associated with geographic information, posting time, and user ids. The availability of such data received from users offers a good opportunity to study the user's spatial-temporal behavior and preference. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model W4 (short for Who+Where+When+What) to exploit such data to discover individual users' mobility behaviors from spatial, temporal and activity aspects. To the best of our knowledge, our work offers the first solution to jointly model individual user's mobility behavior from the three aspects. Our model has a variety of applications, such as user profiling and location prediction; it can be employed to answer questions such as ``Can we infer the location of a user given a tweet posted by the user and the posting time?" Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that the proposed model is effective in discovering users' spatial-temporal topics, and outperforms state-of-the-art baselines significantly for the task of location prediction for tweets.