Year: 2013
Type: article
Abstract: Can online behaviour be used as a proxy for studying urban mobility? The increasing availability of digital mobility traces has provided new insights into collective human behaviour. Mobility datasets have been shown to be an accurate proxy for daily behaviour and social patterns, and behavioural data from Twitter has been used to predict real world phenomena such as cinema ticket sale volumes, stock prices, and disease outbreaks. In this paper we correlate city-scale urban traffic patterns with online search trends to uncover keywords describing the pedestrian traffic location. By analysing a 3-year mobility dataset we show that our approach, called Location Archetype Keyword Extraction (LAKE), is capable of uncovering semantically relevant keywords for describing a location. Our findings demonstrate an overarching relationship between online and offline collective behaviour, and allow for advancing analysis of community-level behaviour by using online search keywords as a practical behaviour proxy.
Source: PLoS ONE
Institution: University of Oulu
Language: English
Subfield: Transportation
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $2,382
Funders: Academy of Finland, Tekes
OpenAlex ID: W2161207539