Mining urban lifestyles: urban computing, human behavior and recommender systems

Abstract

In the last decade, the digital age has sharply redefined the way we study human behavior. With the advancement of data storage and sensing technologies, electronic records now encompass a diverse spectrum of human activity, ranging from location data, phone, and email communication to Twitter activity and opensource contributions on Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap. In particular, the study of the shopping and mobility patterns of individual consumers has the potential to give deeper insight into the lifestyles and infrastructure of the region. Credit card records (CCRs) provide detailed insight into purchase behavior and have been found to have inherent regularity in consumer shopping patterns; call detail records (CDRs) present new opportunities to understand human mobility, analyze wealth, and model social network dynamics.