Short Paper: Evaluation of Location Estimation Method That Focuses on Geographical Proximity of Friends

Our proposed method focuses on offline friends who are acquainted with a target user in the real world. We use Density-Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN) to distinguish between online friends of a target user who are also offline friends and online friends who are acquainted with the target user only in cyberspace. By utilizing the probability of friendship as a function of the geographical distance between users’ home locations, our proposed method achieves an estimation accuracy 1.7 percentage point better than that of a conventional method. We have also been able to verify the effectiveness of an optimization method that narrows down candidate areas for a target user’s home location.