Towards Accurate Social User Geolocation: Mean Shift, Incremental Learning and Graph Convolutional Networks

The geolocation of social users is crucial for understanding user behavior, optimizing advertisement placement, and enhancing public safety.However, existing methods tend to show some deficiencies when handling sparse datasets and may not fully capture the natural clustering characteristics of user locations, thereby resulting in inadequate geolocation accuracy.This paper proposes a novel social user geolocation method (MILGCN) that innovatively integrates Mean Shift Clustering, Incremental Learning, and Graph Convolutional Networks.Specifically, Mean Shift performs fine-grained clustering of user locations based on density peak characteristics, ensuring that geographically close users are grouped into the same cluster.Introducing an incremental learning mechanism into graph convolutional networks enables MILGCN to have progressive learning ability.As a result, the problem of incomplete feature extraction from sparse data is alleviated, resulting in more comprehensive user features and improved geolocation accuracy.Extensive experiments proved that the proposed method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines on the real Twitter datasets, demonstrating a substantial improvement in geolocation performance.