Understanding International Migration using Tensor Factorization

Understanding human migration is of great interest to demographers and social scientists. User generated digital data has made it easier to study such patterns at a global scale. Geo coded Twitter data, in particular, has been shown to be a promising source to analyse large scale human migration. But given the scale of these datasets, a lot of manual effort has to be put into processing and getting actionable insights from this data. In this paper, we explore feasibility of using a new tool, tensor decomposition, to understand trends in global human migration. We model human migration as a three mode tensor, consisting of (origin country, destination country, time of migration) and apply CP decomposition to get meaningful low dimensional factors. Our experiments on a large Twitter dataset spanning 5 years and over 100M tweets show that we can extract meaningful migration patterns.