“Current City” prediction for coarse location based applications on Facebook

Location-Based services with social networks improve users´ experience and enrich people´s social live. However, location information is often inadequate due to privacy and security concerns. We seek to infer users´ `Current City´ on Facebook for coarse location based applications. We first extract users´ multiple explicit and implicit location attributes, and analyze correlations of these attributes from two perspective: user-centric and user-friends. We observe that both user-centric and user-friends location attributes tightly correlate to a user´s Current City (e.g., 60% of users stay in their hometown, 60% of users live in the same city as 50% of their friends). Based on extensive analysis and observations on location attributes correlations, we have constructed a Current City Prediction model (CCP) using artificial neural network (ANN) learning frameworks. The experimental results indicate that we achieve accuracy levels of 84% for city-level prediction and 98% for country-level which are increases of 9% and 18%, respectively than what is possible with Tweecalization.