Quantifying International Travel Flows Using Flickr
PLoS ONEPublished 6 July 2015Open access
Daniele Barchiesi, Helen Susannah Moat, Christian Alis, Steven R. Bishop, Tobias Preis
Citations52
SJR quartileQ1
SJR score0.80
SNIP1.07
Generate an AI Snapshot to get a quick, structured summary of this paper.
Study Snapshot
ObjectiveStudy objective
MethodsResearch methodology
PopulationPopulation studied
Sample sizeSample sizes
OutcomesStudy outcomes here
ResultsStudy results comes here
LimitationsResearch study limitations comes here
A concise AI-generated summary of the paper will appear here once you click Generate AI Snapshot.
TL;DR
It is found that Flickr based estimates of the number of visitors to the United Kingdom significantly correlate with the official estimates released by the UK Office for National Statistics, for 28 countries for which official estimates are calculated.
Abstract
Online social media platforms are opening up new opportunities to analyse human behaviour on an unprecedented scale. In some cases, the fast, cheap measurements of human behaviour gained from these platforms may offer an alternative to gathering such measurements using traditional, time consuming and expensive surveys. Here, we use geotagged photographs uploaded to the photo-sharing website Flickr to quantify international travel flows, by extracting the location of users and inferring trajectories to track their movement across time. We find that Flickr based estimates of the number of visitors to the United Kingdom significantly correlate with the official estimates released by the UK Office for National Statistics, for 28 countries for which official estimates are calculated. Our findings underline the potential for indicators of key aspects of human behaviour, such as mobility, to be generated from data attached to the vast volumes of photographs posted online.
Keywords
Social SciencesMedicine
NatureUnderstanding individual human mobility patterns
6,079 Citations2008Marta C. González, César A. Hidalgo +1 more
The trajectory of 100,000 anonymized mobile phone users whose position is tracked for a six-month period is studied, finding that, in contrast with the random trajectories predicted by the prevailing Lévy flight and random walk models, human trajectories show a high degree of temporal and spatial regularity.
Journal of Computational ScienceTwitter mood predicts the stock market
4,995 Citations2011Johan Bollen, Huina Mao +1 more
This work investigates whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large-scale Twitter feeds are correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time and indicates that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions but not others.
New England Journal of MedicineThe Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years
4,982 Citations2007Nicholas A. Christakis, James H. Fowler
Network phenomena appear to be relevant to the biologic and behavioral trait of obesity, and obesity appears to spread through social ties, which has implications for clinical and public health interventions.
NatureDetecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data
4,406 Citations2008Jeremy Ginsberg, Matthew H. Mohebbi +4 more
A method of analysing large numbers of Google search queries to track influenza-like illness in a population and accurately estimate the current level of weekly influenza activity in each region of the United States with a reporting lag of about one day is presented.
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesThe interaction of TIGIT with PVR and PVRL2 inhibits human NK cell cytotoxicity
3,538 Citations2009Noa Stanietsky, Hrvoje Šimić +12 more
It is shown that TIGIT is expressed by all human NK cells, that it binds PVR and PVRL2 but not PVRL3 and that it inhibits NK cytotoxicity directly through its ITIM, providing an “alternative self” mechanism for MHC class I inhibition.
ScienceQuantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books
3,107 Citations2010Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Shen +12 more
This work surveys the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000, and shows how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology and the pursuit of fame.
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social MediaPredicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment
2,681 Citations2010Andranik Tumasjan, Timm O. Sprenger +2 more
It is found that the mere number of messages mentioning a party reflects the election result, and joint mentions of two parties are in line with real world political ties and coalitions.
NatureA 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization
2,540 Citations2012Robert M. Bond, Christopher J. Fariss +5 more
Results from a randomized controlled trial of political mobilization messages delivered to 61 million Facebook users during the 2010 US congressional elections show that the messages directly influenced political self-expression, information seeking and real-world voting behaviour of millions of people.
Economic RecordPredicting the Present with Google Trends
2,304 Citations2012Hyunyoung Choi, Hal R. Varian
Predicting the Future with Social Media
2,064 Citations2010Sitaram Asur, Bernardo A. Huberman
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesStructure and tie strengths in mobile communication networks
1,958 Citations2007Jukka‐Pekka Onnela, Jari Saramäki +6 more
It is found that, when it comes to information diffusion, weak and strong ties are both simultaneously ineffective, and this coupling significantly slows the diffusion process, resulting in dynamic trapping of information in communities.
Scientific ReportsQuantitative assessment on the cloning efficiencies of lentiviral transfer vectors with a unique clone site
1,027 Citations2012Gang Zhang, Anurag Tandon
A combinatorial strategy to efficiently construct LVs using EGFP, hPlk2 wild type (WT) and mutant genes as inserts using BamH I site for the inserts and the amounts and ratios of the insert and vector DNA were optimized to increase monomeric ligation.
ScienceEconomic Networks: The New Challenges
934 Citations2009Frank Schweitzer, Giorgio Fagiolo +4 more
An approach that stresses the systemic complexity of economic networks and that can be used to revise and extend established paradigms in economic theory will facilitate the design of policies that reduce conflicts between individual interests and global efficiency, as well as reduce the risk of global failure by making economic networks more robust.
Human mobility, social ties, and link prediction
674 Citations2011Dashun Wang, Dino Pedreschi +3 more
It is shown that mobility measures alone yield surprising predictive power, comparable to traditional network-based measures, and the prediction accuracy can be significantly improved by learning a supervised classifier based on combined mobility and network measures.
Proceedings of the National Academy of SciencesPredicting consumer behavior with Web search
647 Citations2010Sharad Goel, Jake M. Hofman +3 more
This work uses search query volume to forecast the opening weekend box-office revenue for feature films, first-month sales of video games, and the rank of songs on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, finding in all cases that search counts are highly predictive of future outcomes.
Crowdsourcing Geographic Knowledge
560 Citations2012Daniel Z. Sui, Sarah Elwood +1 more
This book argues that future progress in VGI research depends in large part on building strong linkages with diverse geographic scholarship, and positions VGI as part of a shift toward hybrid epistemologies, and potentially a fourth paradigm of data-intensive inquiry across the sciences.
SciencePredicting the Behavior of Techno-Social Systems
504 Citations2009Alessandro Vespignani
The accessibility of new data and the advances in the theory and modeling of complex networks are providing an integrated framework that brings us closer to achieving true predictive power of the behavior of techno-social systems.
ScienceEnsuring the Data-Rich Future of the Social Sciences
406 Citations2011Gary King
This work addresses changes and challenges to the scientific infrastructure supporting data sharing, data management, informatics, statistical methodology, and research ethics and policy, and suggests what can be done.
Scientific ReportsQuantifying Wikipedia Usage Patterns Before Stock Market Moves
319 Citations2013Helen Susannah Moat, Chester Curme +4 more
This work investigates whether data generated through Internet usage contain traces of attempts to gather information before trading decisions were taken, and suggests that online data may allow for new insight into early information gathering stages of decision making.
PLoS ONEThe Twitter of Babel: Mapping World Languages through Microblogging Platforms
297 Citations2013Delia Mocanu, Andrea Baronchelli +4 more
PLoS ONEEarly Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data
284 Citations2013Márton Mestyán, Taha Yasseri +1 more
It is shown that the popularity of a movie can be predicted much before its release by measuring and analyzing the activity level of editors and viewers of the corresponding entry to the movie in Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia.
ScienceA network framework of cultural history
237 Citations2014Maximilian Schich, Chaoming Song +5 more
A network of cultural centers connected via the birth and death of more than 150,000 notable individuals revealed human mobility patterns and cultural attraction dynamics and provides a macroscopic perspective of cultural history that helps retrace cultural narratives of Europe and North America using large-scale visualization and quantitative dynamical tools.
Scientific ReportsQuantifying the Behavior of Stock Correlations Under Market Stress
205 Citations2012Tobias Preis, Dror Y. Kenett +3 more
Scientific ReportsLanguages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words
191 Citations2012Alexander M. Petersen, Joel N. Tenenbaum +3 more
The annual growth fluctuations of word use has a decreasing trend as the corpus size increases, indicating a slowdown in linguistic evolution following language expansion.
Advances in Complex SystemsECONOMIC NETWORKS: WHAT DO WE KNOW AND WHAT DO WE NEED TO KNOW?
133 Citations2009Frank Schweitzer, Giorgio Fagiolo +3 more
It is argued that a combination of time-series analysis, complexity theory, and simulation with the analytical tools that have been developed by game theory, as well as graph and matrix theories will help achieving a better integration of theory and data models and provide a better understanding of the potentials and risks of modern economic systems.
Behavioral and Brain SciencesUsing big data to predict collective behavior in the real world
78 Citations2014Helen Susannah Moat, Tobias Preis +3 more
Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social MediaYou Are Where You Edit: Locating Wikipedia Contributors through Edit Histories
57 Citations2009M. A. Lieberman, Jimmy Lin
Results suggest that a wealth of information about contributors can be gleaned from edit histories, and illustrates theacy of data mining on large, publicly-available datasets and raises potential privacy concerns.
PLoS ONESpatio-Temporal Variation of Conversational Utterances on Twitter
6 Citations2013Christian Alis, May Lim
It is shown that utterance lengths in English fictional conversations in books and movies have shortened over a period of 200 years, and argued that shortening of utterances can be explained by the increasing usage of jargon including coined words.