Analysis of Home Location Estimation with Iteration on Twitter Following Relationship

Abstract: User's home locations are used by numerous social media applications, such as social media analysis. However, since the user's home location is not generally open to the public, many researchers have been attempting to develop a more accurate home location estimation. A social network that expresses relationships between users is used to estimate the users' home locations. The network-based home location estimation method with iteration, which propagates the estimated locations, is used to estimate more users' home locations. In this study, we analyze the function of network-based home location estimation with iteration while using the social network based on following relationships on Twitter. The results indicate that the function that selects the most frequent location among the friends' location has the best accuracy. Our analysis also shows that the 88% of users, who are in the social network based on following relationships, has at least one correct home location within one-hop (friends and friends of friends). According to this characteristic of the social network, we indicate that twice is sufficient for iteration.