Discovering Geo-dependent Stories by Combining Density-based Clustering and Thread-based Aggregation techniques
This work addresses the need for efficient real-time urban monitoring and event detection for city planners and researchers, though it is incremental as it combines existing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of detecting unexpected behavior and inferring events in cities by analyzing geo-tagged social media posts, using density-based clustering and natural language processing on Instagram data from New York City over seven months, achieving analysis of millions of data points in under an hour on commodity hardware.
Citizens are actively interacting with their surroundings, especially through social media. Not only do shared posts give important information about what is happening (from the users' perspective), but also the metadata linked to these posts offer relevant data, such as the GPS-location in Location-based Social Networks (LBSNs). In this paper we introduce a global analysis of the geo-tagged posts in social media which supports (i) the detection of unexpected behavior in the city and (ii) the analysis of the posts to infer what is happening. The former is obtained by applying density-based clustering techniques, whereas the latter is consequence of applying natural language processing. We have applied our methodology to a dataset obtained from Instagram activity in New York City for seven months obtaining promising results. The developed algorithms require very low resources, being able to analyze millions of data-points in commodity hardware in less than one hour without applying complex parallelization techniques. Furthermore, the solution can be easily adapted to other geo-tagged data sources without extra effort.