A Robust Noise Resistant Algorithm for POI Identification from Flickr Data

Point of Interests (POI) identification using social media data (e.g. Flickr, Microblog) is one of the most popular research topics in recent years. However, there exist large amounts of noises (POI irrelevant data) in such crowd-contributed collections. Traditional solutions to this problem is to set a global density threshold and remove the data point as noise if its density is lower than the threshold. However, the density values vary significantly among POIs. As the result, some POIs with relatively lower density could not be identified. To solve the problem, we propose a technique based on the local drastic changes of the data density. First we define the local maxima of the density function as the Urban POIs, and the gradient ascent algorithm is exploited to assign data points into different clusters. To remove noises, we incorporate the Laplacian Zero-Crossing points along the gradient ascent process as the boundaries of the POI. Points located outside the POI region are regarded as noises. Then the technique is extended into the geographical and textual joint space so that it can make use of the heterogeneous features of social media. The experimental results show the significance of the proposed approach in removing noises.