Title
Region Sampling And Estimation Of Geosocial Data With Dynamic Range Calibration
Abstract
Location based social networks (LBSNs) are becoming increasingly popular with the fast deployment of broadband mobile networks and the growing prevalence of versatile mobile devices. This success has attracted great interest in studying and measuring the characteristics of LBSNs, such as Facebook Places, Yelp, and Google+ Local. However, it is often prohibitive, and sometimes too costly, to obtain a detailed and complete snapshot of a LBSN due to its usually massive scale. In this work, taking Foursquare as an example, we focus on sampling and estimating restricted geographic regions in LBSNs, such as a city or a country. By exploiting the application programming interfaces (APIs) provided by Foursquare for geographic search, we first introduce how to obtain the "ground truth", namely, a complete set of all venues (i.e., places) in a specified region. Then, we propose random region sampling algorithms that allow us to draw representative samples of venues, and design unbiased estimators of regional characteristics of venues. We validate the efficiency of our sampling algorithms on Foursquare using complete datasets obtained from 12 regions, such as Switzerland, New York City and Los Angeles. Our results are applicable to perform sampling and estimation in all GeoDatabases, such as Facebook Places, Yelp, and Google+ Local, which have similar venue search APIs as Foursquare. These location service providers can also benefit from our results to enable efficient online statistic estimation.
Year
DOI
Venue
2014
10.1109/ICDE.2014.6816726
2014 IEEE 30TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON DATA ENGINEERING (ICDE)
Keywords
Field
DocType
estimation,algorithm design and analysis,clustering algorithms
Data mining,Computer science,Service provider,Mobile device,Ground truth,Application programming interface,Sampling (statistics),Cluster analysis,Snapshot (computer storage),Gibbs sampling,Database
Conference
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
1084-4627
12
0.71
References 
Authors
26
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yanhua Li153947.45
Moritz Steiner271544.39
Jie Bao377443.48
Limin Wang4361.57
Ting Zhu5120.71