Travel topic analysis: a mutually reinforcing method for geo-tagged photos

Sharing personal activities on social networks is very popular nowadays, where the activities include updating status, uploading dining photos, sharing video clips, etc. Finding travel interests hidden in these vast social activities is an interesting but challenging problem. In this work, we attempt to discover travel interests based on the spatial and temporal information of geo-tagged photos. Obviously the visit sequence of a traveler can be approximately captured by her shared photos based on the timestamps and geo-locations. To extract underlying travel topics from abundant visit sequences, we study a novel mixture model to estimate the visiting probability of regions of attractions (ROAs). Such travel topics can be used in different applications, such as advertisements, promotion strategies, and city planning. To enhance the estimation result, we propose a mutual reinforcement framework to improve the quality of ROAs. Finally, we thoroughly evaluate and demonstrate our findings by the photo sharing activities collected from Flickr TM.