Geo-spatial Event Detection in the Twitter Stream

A novel algorithm for geo-spatial event detection on Social Media streams is described, which monitors all posts on Twitter issued in a given geographic region and identifies places that show a high amount of activity.

Abstract

The rise of Social Media services in the last years has created huge streams of information that can be very valuable in a variety of scenarios. What precisely these scenarios are and how the data streams can efficiently be analyzed for each scenario is still largely unclear at this point in time and has therefore created significant interest in industry and academia. In this paper, we describe a novel algorithm for geo-spatial event detection on Social Media streams. We monitor all posts on Twitter issued in a given geographic region and identify places that show a high amount of activity. In a second processing step, we analyze the resulting spatio-temporal clusters of posts with a Machine Learning component in order to detect whether they constitute real-world events or not. We show that this can be done with high precision and recall. The detected events are finally displayed to a user on a map, at the location where they happen and while they happen.