Life of Tokyo as told by FourSquare Check-ins
Like many social network services, FourSquare allows users to “check-in” to let their friends and the world know where they are and what they are up to. In this short analysis, an attempt was made to look closer at the check-in data collected by FourSquare to understand the everyday’s life of people in Tokyo.
About this dataset
This dataset contains check-ins data collected from FourSquare users in Tokyo for about 10 months (from 12 April 2012 to 16 February 2013). It contains 573,703 check-ins data from 2293 unique users. Each check-in is associated with its time stamp, its GPS coordinates and its semantic meaning (represented by fine-grained venue-categories).
The data set can be downloaded from here.
Following is the citation of the dataset author’s paper:
Dingqi Yang, Daqing Zhang, Vincent W. Zheng, Zhiyong Yu. Modeling User Activity Preference by Leveraging User Spatial Temporal Characteristics in LBSNs. IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, (TSMC), 45(1), 129-142, 2015.
What are the most popular check-in spots?
There are 247 unique venue categories in this dataset, from ramen house to Argentinian restaurant, toy store to cosmetics shop, schools, government building, and public transportation facilities, etc. The top 10 check-in veneu categories account for about 62% of all check-ins, and it is interesting to see that most of the check-ins come from train stations and subways. Looks like there is something special about letting the world knows you are on the subway or your presence at a train station?
When do they check-in?
It would be interesting to see what time of the day people check-in and let the world knows their whereabouts. It is not surprising to see the check-in patterns are distinctly different between weekdays and weekends. On the weekdays, the two most popular times to check-in are around 8 a.m. and 7 p.m.. Perhaps people are excited about the thought of going to work, or even more so, the thought of getting off work, and have the urge to check-in. On the weekends, there are not that many activities until in the afternoon and the evenings.
Where do people check-in in those popluar hours?
An hour by hour snapshot of the top check-in venue categories will give us a clearer picture of the lives of the people in Tokyo.
A couple of interesting observations:
Train stations take the top spot in almost every one-hour period, seven days a week. What is the allure of checking in at train stations?
Convenience stores and bars take the top spots around 2 a.m.
Ramem/Noodle houses are consistently ranked above all other restaurants in almost every one-hour period, and have the highest number of averager check-ins during lunch hours. This makes sense as ramen is considered a type of fast food in Japan.