Finding regions of interest using location based social media

The discovery of regions of interest in city groups is increasingly important in recent years. In this light, we propose and investigate a novel problem called Region Discovery query (RD query) that finds regions of interest with respect to a user's current geographic location. Given a set of spatial objects O and a query location q, if a circular region ω is with high spatial-object density and is spatially close to q, it is returned by the query and is recommended to users. This type of query can bring significant benefit to users in many useful applications such as trip planning and region recommendation. The RD query faces a big challenge: how to prune the search space in the spatial and density domains. To overcome the challenge and process the RD query efficiently, we propose a novel collaboration search method and we define a pair of bounds to prune the search space effectively. The performance of the RD query is studied by extensive experiments on real and synthetic spatial data.