Understanding Geographical Phenomena and Its Applications Using Online Social Networks

Abstract

The study of different geographies such as different countries, states, cities has always newlinebeen of utmost interest. The exploration of different geographies and associated human newlinebehaviour helps in improvising the overall living standard of human civilization. For newlineexample, the exploration of topic of discussion across different geographies unveils interesting newlinecultural traits of a geography and hence helps in policy making in accordance with newlinecultural traits of a geography. Additionally, the investigation of people and places also newlinehelps in efficient targeted advertisement, targeted news, and many other location based newlineservices. The analysis and understanding of the science of people across geography helps newlinein upgrading the social, cultural, and economical standard of people. newlineAs the human civilization is growing and developing, there have been related contemporary newlineethnographic researches. However, those studies had limited scope in terms newlineof number of people participated and also in terms of span of geography that was considered. newlineMoreover, those were based on predefined set of questionnaire which might not newlinebe very relevant to the participants and hence the acquired answer is also doubtful. In newlinerecent days, there have been an explosion of usage of online social networks. Online social newlinenetwork captures multiple dimension of human behavior and hence heavy usage of online newlinesocial networks have accelerated research around human behaviour. These researches have newlinegained further momentum with availability of location-tagged online social network data. newlineThe usage of location-tagged social network data for different ethnographic study has several newlinechallenges and limitations such as data sparsity, biases, incomplete information and newlinemany more. In this thesis, we solve a few of these challenges by proposing geographic newlineinformation retrieval and analyzing techniques to add to the existing knowledge about newlinedifferent geographies and geographical phenomena. We are trying to provide an analytical newlinestudy that might help in policy making, targeted