Discovering Mobility Patterns of Instagram Users through Process Mining Techniques

Abstract

Every day a huge amount of data is generated by users of social media platforms, like Facebook, Twitter and so on. Analyzing data posted by people interested in a given topic or event allows inferring patterns and trends about people behaviors on a very large scale. These posts are often geotagged, this way enabling mobility pattern analysis. In this work, we investigate the use of Process Mining techniques to support the discovery and the analysis of mobility patterns of social media users. We discuss the results obtained analyzing posts of Instagram users who visited EXPO 2015, the Universal Exposition hosted in Milan, Italy, from May to October 2015.