Analysis of mobile user behavior in vehicular social networks

Abstract

Participatory social networks can provide great amount of data about users and their surroundings. When properly crafted, this data can be used as an important source of information about human behavior. In this paper, we use a vehicular social network aiming to evaluate the impact of external factors from vehicular environments on users' contributions to social networks. Results from a publicly available Waze dataset show that users are mostly motivated to post traffic jam information and that they do it during rush hours on weekdays and during the afternoon on weekends. We also observe that users who receive low reliability on their posts tend to keep low scores in the following. Finally, results additionally indicate that users at higher speeds do not contribute to the network and that posts experiencing longer delays until published are poorly evaluated.