Identifying concavity laws of attractiveness character for composite regions: Application through geo-tagged media check-ins

In this era of social networking sites, people's behavior online could help us have an idea about their offline lives as well. Social check-ins, which store geo-tagged information about users, can be utilized by researchers to investigate the tastes and preferences of individuals for the places they live in or travel to. In this paper, I introduce one possible research direction that can be taken using Yahoo Flickr Creative Commons 100M dataset of publically available geo-tagged media objects. I intended to focus this study on investigating the attractiveness character of most checked-in countries and large-scale composite regions, like the states of US, for foreign tourists. The attractiveness character is specified as the total amount of media check-ins done by the visitors compared to the population size of the country or state. In addition to this, I utilize International migrations dataset, made available publically by UN, to analyze the attractiveness potential of destination countries/states from a long-term perspective too. As most studies show that the attractiveness of cities follows a super-linear trend, my study is about identifying if the same trend is applicable to the attractiveness of large-scale composite regions too. In the end, the explanation of the results is discussed.