Find You from Who You Mentioned @: Home Location Inference Based on Social Ties in Social Media

Abstract

Location of user plays an increasingly critical role in applications in social media. However, its utility is limited by missing of location information for the privacy and security concerns. This paper presents a novel approach to infer user's home location based on social ties. We observe that users interact with friends closer and hypothesis that social interactions is competent to infer locations. We define similarity between users, leverage a Gaussian mixture model based on users' social ties. The experimental results on a large scale dataset in Tencent microblog demonstrate that the social-tie-based-algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in accuracy.