Venue graph – where do people go next?

Our next use case on Foursquare data is geared more towards creative data extraction. We will demonstrate how the combination of some creativity with the basic data can give rise to unusual datasets. The base data of Foursquare is not really suitable for extracting a graph-based dataset. But a close examination of the APIs reveals an end point which will give the next five venues people go to from any given venue. This can be combined with a graph search algorithm such as a depth-first search to create a graph in which venues can be linked to the next possible venues.

To extract this data, we will use our two utility functions:

• extract_venue_details: This function will get us the venue details of each venue occurring in our traversal

• extract_next_venue_details: This function will get us information about the next five venues to which users go from a particular venue

• extract_dfs_data: This the implementation of a depth-first search in R which will take...