We know how you live: exploring the spectrum of urban lifestyles

Abstract

An incisive understanding of human lifestyles is not only essential to many scientific disciplines, but also has a profound business impact for targeted marketing. In this paper, we present LifeSpec, a computational framework for exploring and hierarchically categorizing urban lifestyles. Specifically, we have developed an algorithm to connect multiple social network accounts of millions of individuals and collect their publicly available heterogeneous behavioral data as well as social links. In addition, a nonparametric Bayesian approach is developed to model the lifestyle spectrum of a group of individuals. To demonstrate the effectiveness of LifeSpec, we conducted extensive experiments and case studies, with a large dataset we collected covering 1 million individuals from 493 cities. Our results suggest that LifeSpec offers a powerful paradigm for 1) revealing an individual's lifestyle from multiple dimensions, and 2) uncovering lifestyle commonalities and variations of a group with various demographic attributes, such as vocation, education, gender, sexual orientation, and place of residence. The proposed method provides emerging implications for personalized recommendation and targeted advertising.