Happiness and the Patterns of Life: A Study of Geolocated Tweets

Understand

The patterns of life exhibited by large populations have been described and modeled both as a basic science exercise and for a range of applied goals such as reducing automotive congestion, improving disaster response, and even predicting the location of individuals.

• However, these studies previously had limited access to conversation content, rendering changes in expression as a function of movement invisible.
• In addition, they typically use the communication between a mobile phone and its nearest antenna tower to infer position, limiting the spatial resolution of the data to the geographical region serviced by each cellphone tower.
• We use a collection of 37 million geolocated tweets to characterize the movement patterns of 180,000 individuals, taking advantage of several orders of magnitude of increased spatial accuracy relative to previous work.