# Tales of Two Cities: Using Social Media to Understand Idiosyncratic Lifestyles in Distinctive Metropolitan Areas

## TL;DR

This study uses social media data to compare lifestyle behaviors in large and small U.S. cities, revealing distinct human behavior patterns and demonstrating a scalable, low-cost alternative to traditional surveys.

## Contribution

It introduces a social media-based method employing matrix factor analysis to analyze and compare urban lifestyles across different city sizes.

## Key findings

- Identified unique mobility and work-rest patterns in large vs. small cities
- Quantitatively compared individual behaviors across city sizes
- Demonstrated social media as a powerful tool for lifestyle analysis

## Abstract

Lifestyles are a valuable model for understanding individuals' physical and mental lives, comparing social groups, and making recommendations for improving people's lives. In this paper, we examine and compare lifestyle behaviors of people living in cities of different sizes, utilizing freely available social media data as a large-scale, low-cost alternative to traditional survey methods. We use the Greater New York City area as a representative for large cities, and the Greater Rochester area as a representative for smaller cities in the United States. We employed matrix factor analysis as an unsupervised method to extract salient mobility and work-rest patterns for a large population of users within each metropolitan area. We discovered interesting human behavior patterns at both a larger scale and a finer granularity than is present in previous literature, some of which allow us to quantitatively compare the behaviors of individuals of living in big cities to those living in small cities. We believe that our social media-based approach to lifestyle analysis represents a powerful tool for social computing in the big data age.