Density-Based Estimation of POI Boundaries Using Geo-Tagged Tweets

Abstract

Users tend to check in and post their statuses in location-based social networks (LBSNs) to describe that their interests are related to a point-of-interest (POI). While previous studies on discovering area-of-interests (AOIs) were conducted mostly on the basis of density-based clustering methods with the collection of geo-tagged photos from LBSNs, we focus on estimating a POI boundary, which corresponds to only one cluster containing its POI center. Using geo-tagged tweets recorded from Twitter users, this paper introduces a density-based low-complexity two-phase method to estimate a POI boundary by finding a suitable radius reachable from the POI center. We estimate a boundary of the POI as the convex hull of selected geo-tags through our two-phase density-based estimation, where each phase proceeds with different sizes of radius increment. It is shown that our method outperforms the conventional density-based clustering method in terms of computational complexity.