Title: Predicting Demographics of High-Resolution Geographies with Geotagged Tweets,
Abstract: In this paper, we consider the problem of predicting demographics of
geographic units given geotagged Tweets that are composed within these units.
Traditional survey methods that offer demographics estimates are usually
limited in terms of geographic resolution, geographic boundaries, and time
intervals. Thus, it would be highly useful to develop computational methods
that can complement traditional survey methods by offering demographics
estimates at finer geographic resolutions, with flexible geographic boundaries
(i.e. not confined to administrative boundaries), and at different time
intervals. While prior work has focused on predicting demographics and health
statistics at relatively coarse geographic resolutions such as the county-level
or state-level, we introduce an approach to predict demographics at finer
geographic resolutions such as the blockgroup-level. For the task of predicting
gender and race/ethnicity counts at the blockgroup-level, an approach adapted
from prior work to our problem achieves an average correlation of 0.389
(gender) and 0.569 (race) on a held-out test dataset. Our approach outperforms
this prior approach with an average correlation of 0.671 (gender) and 0.692
(race).