Where am I? Location archetype keyword extraction from urban mobility patterns

PLoS One. 2013 May 21;8(5):e63980. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0063980. Print 2013.

Abstract

Can online behaviour be used as a proxy for studying urban mobility? The increasing availability of digital mobility traces has provided new insights into collective human behaviour. Mobility datasets have been shown to be an accurate proxy for daily behaviour and social patterns, and behavioural data from Twitter has been used to predict real world phenomena such as cinema ticket sale volumes, stock prices, and disease outbreaks. In this paper we correlate city-scale urban traffic patterns with online search trends to uncover keywords describing the pedestrian traffic location. By analysing a 3-year mobility dataset we show that our approach, called Location Archetype Keyword Extraction (LAKE), is capable of uncovering semantically relevant keywords for describing a location. Our findings demonstrate an overarching relationship between online and offline collective behaviour, and allow for advancing analysis of community-level behaviour by using online search keywords as a practical behaviour proxy.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms*
  • Cities*
  • Geography
  • Humans
  • Linear Models
  • Movement*
  • Search Engine
  • Surveys and Questionnaires
  • Walking
  • Wireless Technology

Grants and funding

This work was partially funded by the Academy of Finland, TEKES - the Finnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, the City of Oulu, and the commercial partners of the UbiOulu program. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.