Socialradius: Visual exploration of user check-in behavior based on social media data

Abstract

The in-depth understanding of the reason why users contribute to the check-in records is of great value in a variety of applications, such as transportation system design, information recommendation, and business intelligence. The widespread application of social media has brought about large-scale and fined-grained data for the exploration of user check-in records from multi-perspectives. However, it is still an arduous task to gain insight into users’ check-in behavior due to the complexity and multi-dimensions of the data nature. In this paper, a novel visual analytics system, socialRadius, is proposed to interactively explore spatio-temporal features of check-in behaviors for particular groups and active users extracted from the group. The design in the paper focuses on two major characteristics of check-in data for the specific group: spatio-temporal features and check-in activities. The integration of visualization techniques with new designs has offered us the opportunities to explore and identify the potential patterns based on these two major components. Besides, case studies on real check-in data demonstrate the effectiveness of the system in exploring spatio-temporal features for specific groups.