Understanding urban human activity and mobility patterns using large-scale location-based data from online social media

Location-based check-in services enable individuals to share their activity-related choices providing a new source of human activity data for researchers. In this paper urban human mobility and activity patterns are analyzed using location-based data collected from social media applications (e.g. Foursquare and Twitter). We first characterize aggregate activity patterns by finding the distributions of different activity categories over a city geography and thus determine the purpose-specific activity distribution maps. We then characterize individual activity patterns by finding the timing distribution of visiting different places depending on activity category. We also explore the frequency of visiting a place with respect to the rank of the place in individual's visitation records and show interesting match with the results from other studies based on mobile phone data.