GeoSocialBound: an efficient framework for estimating social POI boundaries using spatio--textual information

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel framework for estimating social point-of-interest (POI) boundaries, also termed GeoSocialBound, utilizing spatio--textual information based on geo-tagged tweets. We first start by defining a social POI boundary as one small-scale cluster containing its POI center, geographically formed with a convex polygon. Motivated by an insightful observation with regard to estimation accuracy, we formulate a constrained optimization problem, in which we are interested in finding the radius of a circle such that a newly defined objective function is maximized. To solve this problem, we introduce an efficient optimal estimation algorithm whose runtime complexity is linear in the number of geo-tags in a dataset. In addition, we empirically evaluate the estimation performance of our GeoSocialBound algorithm for various environments and validate the complexity analysis. As a result, vital information on how to obtain real-world GeoSocialBounds with a high degree of accuracy is provided.