Ranking the City: The Role of Location-Based Social Media Check-Ins in Collective Human Mobility Prediction

Technological advances have led to an increasing development of data sources. Since the introduction of social networks, numerous studies on the relationships between users and their behaviors have been conducted. In this context, trip behavior is an interesting topic that can be explored via Location-Based Social Networks (LBSN). Due to the wide availability of various spatial data sources, the long-standing field of collective human mobility prediction has been revived and new models have been introduced. Recently, a parameterized model of predicting human mobility in cities, known as rank-based model, has been introduced. The model predicts the flow from an origin toward a destination using “rank” concept. However, the notion of rank has not yet been well explored. In this study, we investigate the potential of LBSN data alongside the rank concept in predicting human mobility patterns in Manhattan, New York City. For this purpose, we propose three scenarios, including: rank-distance, the number of venues between origin and destination, and a check-in weighted venue schema to compute the ranks. When trip distribution patterns are considered as a whole, applying a check-in weighting schema results in patterns that are approximately 10 percent more similar to the ground truth data. From the accuracy perspective, as the predicted numbers of trips are closer to real number of trips, the trip distribution is also enhanced by about 50 percent