You are What you Eat (and Drink): Identifying Cultural Boundaries by Analyzing Food & Drink Habits in Foursquare

摘要

Food and drink are two of the most basic needs of human beings. However, associety evolved, food and drink became also a strong cultural aspect, beingable to describe strong differences among people. Traditional methods used toanalyze cross-cultural differences are mainly based on surveys and, for thisreason, they are very difficult to represent a significant statistical sampleat a global scale. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to identifycultural boundaries and similarities across populations at different scalesbased on the analysis of Foursquare check-ins. This approach might be usefulnot only for economic purposes, but also to support existing and novelmarketing and social applications. Our methodology consists of the followingsteps. First, we map food and drink related check-ins extracted from Foursquareinto users' cultural preferences. Second, we identify particular individualpreferences, such as the taste for a certain type of food or drink, e.g., pizzaor sake, as well as temporal habits, such as the time and day of the week whenan individual goes to a restaurant or a bar. Third, we show how to analyze thisinformation to assess the cultural distance between two countries, cities oreven areas of a city. Fourth, we apply a simple clustering technique, usingthis cultural distance measure, to draw cultural boundaries across countries,cities and regions.