Estimating the Distribution of Economy Activity: A Case Study in Jiangsu Province (China) Using Large Scale Social Network Data

Understanding the spatial distribution of human social-economic activities helps marketing, policy making, planning, and government management. With rapid growing of internet, communication technology and the high penetration of mobile phones, massive activity data is collected from people daily life, giving us an opportunity to estimate the national distribution of human activities. This paper proposed a human-sensing approach to estimate the spatial distribution of economic activity derived from the mass of human mobility data. Comparisons with the economic activity estimation method based on a remote-sensing technology (i.e., Night-time light imagery) are analyzed. The results indicated that human mobility and activity data is a good indicator to model the high-resolution economic activity.