Activity space estimation with longitudinal observations of social media data

In this paper, we demonstrate the use of an inexpensive and easy-to-collect long-term dataset to address the problems caused by basing activity space studies off short-term data. In total, we use 63,114 geo-tagged tweets from 116 unique users to create individuals’ activity spaces based on minimum bounding geometry (convex hull). By using polygon density maps of activity space, we found clear differences between weekday and weekend activity spaces, and were able to observe the growth trajectory of activity space over 17 weeks. In order to reflect the heterogeneous nature of spatial behavior and tweeting habits, we used Latent Class Analysis twice. First, to identify five unique patterns of location-based activity spaces that are different in shape and anchoring. Second, we identify three unique growth trajectories. The comparison among these latent growth trajectories shows that in order to capture the extent of activity spaces we need long time periods for some individuals and shorter periods of observation for others. We also show that past studies using a single digit number of weeks may not be sufficient to capture individuals’ activity space. The major activity locations identified using a multilevel latent class model, do not appear to be statistically related to the growth patterns of Twitter users activity spaces. The evidence here shows Twitter data can be a valuable complementary source of information for heterogeneity analysis in activity-based modeling and simulation.