GeoTrend: spatial trending queries on real-time microblogs

Abstract

This paper presents GeoTrend; a system for scalable support of spatial trend discovery on recent microblogs, e.g., tweets and online reviews, that come in real time. GeoTrend is distinguished from existing techniques in three aspects: (1) It discovers trends in arbitrary spatial regions, e.g., city blocks. (2) It supports trending measures that effectively capture trending items under a variety of definitions that suit different applications. (3) It promotes recent microblogs as first-class citizens and optimizes its system components to digest a continuous flow of fast data in main-memory while removing old data efficiently. GeoTrend queries are top-k queries that discover the most trending k keywords that are posted within an arbitrary spatial region and during the last T time units. To support its queries efficiently, GeoTrend employs an in-memory spatial index that is able to efficiently digest incoming data and expire data that is beyond the last T time units. The index also materializes top-k keywords in different spatial regions so that incoming queries can be processed with low latency. In case of peak times, a main-memory optimization technique is employed to shed less important data, so that the system still sustains high query accuracy with limited memory resources. Experimental results based on real Twitter feed and Bing Mobile spatial search queries show the scalability of GeoTrend to support arrival rates of up to 50,000 microblog/second, average query latency of 3 milli-seconds, and at least 90+% query accuracy even under limited memory resources.