Precise localization of homes and activities: Detecting drinking-while-tweeting patterns in communities

Abstract

There has been an explosion of research on analyzing social media to map human behavior relevant to public health, such as drinking or drug use. However, it is important not only to detect the local regions where these activities occur, but also to analyze the degree of participation in them by local residents. We develop powerful new methods for fine-grained localization of activities and home locations using Twitter data. We apply these methods to discover and compare alcohol use patterns in a large city, New York City, and a more suburban and rural area, Monroe County.