Tweeque: Spatio-Temporal Analysis of Social Networks for Location Mining Using Graph Partitioning

Because of privacy and security reasons, most of the people on social networking sites like Twitter are unwilling to specify their locations in the profiles. In this paper, we present a completely novel approach, Tweeque which is a spatio-temporal mining algorithm that predicts the current location of the user purely on the basis of his social network. The algorithm goes beyond the previous approaches by linking geospatial proximity to friendship and understanding the social phenomenon of migration. The algorithm then performs graph partitioning for identifying social groups allowing us to implicitly consider time as a factor for prediction of user´s most current city location. We perform extensive experiments to show the validity of our system in terms of both accuracy and running time.