Drinks & Crowds: Characterizing Alcohol Consumption through Crowdsensing and Social Media

The design of computational methods to recognize alcohol intake is a relevant problem in ubiquitous computing. While mobile crowdsensing and social media analytics are two current approaches to characterize alcohol consumption in everyday life, the question of how they can be integrated, to examine their relative value as informative of the drinking phenomenon and to exploit their complementarity towards the classification of drinking-related attributes, remains as an open issue. In this paper, we present a comparative study based on five years of Instagram data about alcohol consumption and a 200+ person crowdsensing campaign collected in the same country (Switzerland). Our contributions are two-fold. First, we conduct data analyses that uncover temporal, spatial, and social contextual patterns of alcohol consumption on weekend nights as represented by both crowdsensing and social media. This comparative analysis provides a contextual snapshot of the alcohol drinking practices of urban youth dwellers. Second, we use a machine learning framework to classify individual drinking events according to alcohol and non-alcohol categories, using images features and contextual cues from individual and joint data sources. Our best performing models give an accuracy of 82.3% on alcohol category classification (against a baseline of 48.5%) and 90% on alcohol/non-alcohol classification (against a baseline of 65.9%) using a fusion of image features and contextual cues in this task. Our work uncovers important patterns in drinking behaviour across these two datasets and the results of study are promising towards developing systems that use machine learning for self-monitoring of alcohol consumption.