Spatiotemporal Filtering Pipeline for Efficient Social Networks Data Processing Algorithms

One of the areas that gathers momentum is the investigation of location-based social networks (LBSNs) because the understanding of citizens’ behavior on various scales can help to improve quality of living, enhance urban management, and advance the development of smart cities. But it is widely known that the performance of algorithms for data mining and analysis heavily relies on the quality of input data. The main aim of this paper is helping LBSN researchers to perform a preliminary step of data preprocessing and thus increase the efficiency of their algorithms. To do that we propose a spatiotemporal data processing pipeline that is general enough to fit most of the problems related to working with LBSNs. The proposed pipeline includes four main stages: an identification of suspicious profiles, a background extraction, a spatial context extraction, and a fake transitions detection. Efficiency of the pipeline is demonstrated on three practical applications using different LBSN: touristic itinerary generation using Facebook locations, sentiment analysis of an area with the help of Twitter and VK.com, and multiscale events detection from Instagram posts.