

Lack of Twitter geotags can’t stop researchers from getting location - hashx
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/lack-of-twitter-geotags-cant-stop-researchers-from-getting-location/

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markovbling
This is incredible - such an elegant insight!

For anyone too lazy to read the paper: "Our best method achieves accuracies of
64% for cities, 66% for states, 78% for time zones and 71% for regions when
trained and tested using a dataset consisting of 1.52 million tweets from 9551
users from the top 100 US cities."

My first impulse was that there must be an incredible amount of noise from
people tweeting passively "about" other locations (sports teams, old colleges,
promoting conferences they're not attending) but they take an interesting
approach in paying special to time-zones.

The problem of identifying whether someone making a tweet is traveling is an
interesting factor to consider given "when users identified as travelling are
eliminated, location prediction accuracy improves to 68% for cities, 70% for
states, 80% for time-zones and 73% for regions."

In the paper, "a user was labeled as traveling if his/her maximum geo distance
between tweets was above 100 miles, and not-traveling otherwise."

I wonder if a better approach might be to first detect if the times that they
post tweets has shifted (different time-zone). If everything about a person's
tweets is the same except they're categorically 2 hours later and they also
tweet terms indicating a new location ("the view from x is amazing") then they
could at least take a step toward pre-filtering traveling users without
requiring their tweets to be geo-tagged.

For anybody else interested in geo-tagged social data, Mapbox did an
incredible piece titled "Visualizing 3 Billion Tweets" here
[https://www.mapbox.com/blog/visualizing-3-billion-
tweets/](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/visualizing-3-billion-tweets/)

And I submitted a great video on using geo-tagged Flickr to track bird
migration patterns here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445105](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445105)

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yeukhon
The thing that strikes me most from this article is "very few Twitter users
actually tweet".

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ceoj
Yes, same should be true for hn as well.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%2...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1%25_rule_%28Internet_culture%29)

