Investigating city characteristics based on community profiling in LBSNs

While the detection of social subgroups (i.e., communities) has always been a fundamental task in social network analysis, few efforts has been made to characterize the detected community. Meanwhile, to effectively facilitate applications based on the community structure, it is very important to understand the features of each community. Thereby, a systematic community profiling mechanism is needed. With the recent surge of location-based social networks (LBSNs, e.g., Foursquare, Facebook Places), huge amount of digital footprints about users' locations, profiles as well as their online social connections provide sufficient metadata for community profiling. Different from social networks (e.g., Flickr, Facebook) which have explicit groups for users to subscribe or join, LBSNs usually have no explicit community structure. In order to capitalize on the large number of potential users, quality community detection and profiling approaches are needed so as to enable applications such as direct marketing, group tracking, etc. In this paper, based on the user-venue check-in relationship and user/venue attributes, we come out with a novel community profiling framework. Specifically, we first adopt edge-clustering to simultaneously group both users and venues into communities, and then based on the rich metadata of users and venues we put forward a quantitative community profiling mechanism to indicate the preferences, interests and habits of a community. The efficacy of our approach is validated by intensive empirical evaluations using the collected Foursquare dataset of 266,838 users with 9,803,764 check-ins over 2,477,122 venues worldwide.