A Social Media Data-Driven Platform for Informed Data Collection

Grant McKenzie of Spatial Development International in the U.S. will map the location of activities (touch points) related to financial services in developing countries by geosocial data mining, analysis and modeling to increase the efficiency and reduce the cost of data collection. They will first evaluate whether social media platforms such as Facebook, which include some geographic information, can be used to identify the location of actual touch point locations and from that develop a spatial regression model for estimating distribution in an unmapped, developing country. They will also develop a data collection platform that displays point of interest data for users to supplement with photographs and text, and add any unmapped touch points. In this way, unmapped regions can be easily identified for further exploration. They will evaluate the platform by surveying its performance in a test country.