Discovering New Socio-demographic Regional Patterns in Cities

During the past few years, the analysis of data generated from Location-Based Social Networks (LBSNs) have aided in the identification of urban patterns, understanding activity behaviours in urban areas, as well as producing novel recommender systems that facilitate users' choices. However, the recent advancement in machine learning techniques promises new deeper insights with the possibility of finding new spatio-temporal patterns in cities. In this paper, we show that one of the recent advancements in machine learning, Deep Belief Networks (DBNs), can discover a new type of pattern, which we refer to in the paper as the Socio-demographic Regional Pattern. This pattern illustrates the ability of predicting the district of a city given a set of weekly activities captured from LBSNs. Specifically, we have found instances of this embedded pattern for the boroughs in New York City by training a DBN model that can classify with nearly 70% accuracy the location of weekly region-footprints. We further validated the existence and complexity of this type of pattern by applying a probabilistic topic model, namely Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). We believe that this research can yield to a deeper understanding about social commonalities and the geographical evolution of different regions and areas, between cities across the globe.

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