Estimating hourly population distribution change at high spatiotemporal resolution in urban areas using geo-tagged tweets, land use data, and dasymetric maps

This paper introduces a spatiotemporal analysis framework for estimating hourly changing population distribution in urban areas using geo-tagged tweets (the messages containing users' physical locations), land use data, and dasymetric maps. We collected geo-tagged social media (tweets) within the County of San Diego during one year (2015) by using Twitter's Streaming Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). A semi-manual Twitter content verification procedure for data cleaning was applied first to separate tweets created by humans and non-human users (bots). The next step is to calculate the number of unique Twitter users every hour with the two different geographical units: (1) census blocks, and (2) 1km by 1km resolution grids of LandScan. The final step is to estimate actual dynamic population by transforming the numbers of unique Twitter users in each census block or grid into estimated population densities with spatial and temporal variation factors. A temporal factor was based on hourly frequency changes of unique Twitter users within San Diego County, CA. A spatial factor was estimated by using the dasymetric method with land use maps and 2010 census data. Several comparison maps were created to visualize the spatiotemporal pattern changes of dynamic population distribution.

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