“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.