Inferring Commuting Statistics in the Greater Jakarta area with Twitter

Pulse Lab Jakarta

Project Description

Some estimates for Greater Jakarta put the population at over 30 million. Within the boundaries of the city itself the transport system has to handle 1.38 million daily commuters. Policy makers need regular updates to track the rhythm of the city and best optimise public transport.

Pulse Lab Jakarta worked with the Indonesian Institute of Statistics to understand whether location information from social media on mobile devices can reveal commuting patterns in Greater Jakarta.

First, the Lab produced Origin-Destination statistics for the ten cities in Greater Jakarta from GPS-stamped tweets by identifying a subset of people who commute between these areas. Secondly, the project calibrated the initial result based on the population distribution and Twitter user distribution.

The results were verified against the official commuting statistics produced by the Indonesian Bureau of Statistics. The results of the research have confirmed to date that geo-located tweets have the potential to fill the information gaps from the official commuting statistics.

Paper: Inferring Commuting Statistics in Greater Jakarta from Social Media Locational Information from Mobile Devices

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