Modeling geo homopholy in online social networks for population distribution projection

PurposeProjecting the population distribution in geographical regions is important for many applications such as launching marketing campaigns or enhancing the public safety in certain densely populated areas. Conventional studies require the collection of people’s trajectory data through offline means, which is limited in terms of cost and data availability. The wide use of online social network (OSN) apps over smartphones has provided the opportunities of devising a lightweight approach of conducting the study using the online data of smartphone apps. This paper aims to reveal the relationship between the online social networks and the offline communities, as well as to project the population distribution by modeling geo-homophily in the online social networks.Design/methodology/approachIn this paper, the authors propose the concept of geo-homophily in OSNs to determine how much the data of an OSN …