Closeness and Structure of Friends Help to Estimate User Locations

A tremendous amount of information is being shared every day on social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter or Google+. However, only a small portion of users provide their location information, which can be helpful in targeted advertising and many other services. Current methods in location estimation using social relationships consider social friendship as a simple binary relationship. However, social closeness between users and structure of friends have strong implications on geographic distances. In this paper, we introduce different measures to evaluate the social closeness between users and structure of friends. We propose models that use them for location estimation. Compared with the models which take the friend relation as a binary feature, social closeness can help identify which friend of a user is more important and friend structure can help to determine significance level of locations, thus improving the accuracy of the location estimation models. A confidence iteration method is further introduced to improve estimation accuracy and overcome the problem of scarce location information. We evaluate our methods on two different datasets, Twitter and Gowalla. The results show that our model can improve the estimation accuracy by 5% 20% compared with state-of-the-art friendbased models.