Understanding event attendance through analysis of human crowd behavior in social networks

Abstract

Understanding human crowd mobility has found important applications in several commercial domains such as marketing, recommendation systems and resource planning. In this paper we investigate users' social activities and interactions developed in "human-centered participatory sensing" groups and perform an analysis to understand human crowd behavior. We exploit two popular real and heterogeneous datasets for our analysis: an event based social network (Meetup) dataset and a checkin-based geosocial network (Foursquare) dataset, to understand user attendance in social community events and provide insights into the factors that influence users to attend events.