Complementing Location-Based Social Network Data With Mobility Data: A Pattern-Based Approach

Location-Based Social Networks can be profitably exploited to characterize citizens’ activities in urban environments. However, collecting LBSN is potentially challenging due to privacy concerns, connectivity issues, and potential imbalances in LBSN service usage. We propose to complement LBSN data with mobility data in the analysis of citizens’ activities in urban areas. Unlike the explicit insights provided by LBSN users, mobility data give implicit feedback on citizens’ habits. This paper explores the spatial and temporal conditions under which user habits are coherent according to both sources and reports the most reliable common sequences of visited categories of Points-Of-Interests. To this aim, it relies on a multidimensional model in which recurrent citizens’ activities are described by a new pattern type, namely the generalized activity pattern. It also detects the eventual presence of bias between LBSN and mobility user activities by customizing the established Statistical Parity metric. The motivations behind the detected bias are explained in terms of combinations of POI categories that are most likely to be the main causes. We evaluate the proposed approach on real-world data achieved from Foursquare check-ins, taxi service, and free-floating car sharing. The results highlight not only the complementarity of the data sources regarding specific POI categories, but also their interchangeability in many spatio-temporal conditions.