Signed Network Modeling Based on Structural Balance Theory

The modeling of networks, specifically generative models, have been shown to provide a plethora of information about the underlying network structures, as well as many other benefits behind their construction. Recently there has been a considerable increase in interest for the better understanding and modeling of networks, but the vast majority of this work has been for unsigned networks. However, many networks can have positive and negative links(or signed networks), especially in online social media, and they inherently have properties not found in unsigned networks due to the added complexity. Specifically, the positive to negative link ratio and the distribution of signed triangles in the networks are properties that are unique to signed networks and would need to be explicitly modeled. This is because their underlying dynamics are not random, but controlled by social theories, such as Structural Balance Theory, which loosely states that users in social networks will prefer triadic relations that involve less tension. Therefore, we propose a model based on Structural Balance Theory and the unsigned Transitive Chung-Lu model for the modeling of signed networks. Our model introduces two parameters that are able to help maintain the positive link ratio and proportion of balanced triangles. Empirical experiments on three real-world signed networks demonstrate the importance of designing models specific to signed networks based on social theories to obtain better performance in maintaining signed network properties while generating synthetic networks.Comment: CIKM 2018: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=327174

Improving customer churn prediction by data augmentation using pictorial stimulus-choice data

The purpose of this paper is to determine the added value of pictorial stimulus-choice data in customer churn prediction. Using Random Forests and 5 times 2 fold cross-validation, this study analyzes how much pictorial stimulus choice data and survey data increase the AUC of a churn model over and above administrative, operational and complaints data. The finding is that pictorial-stimulus choice data significantly increases AUC of models with administrative and operational data. The practical implication of this finding is that companies should start considering mining pictorial data from social media sites (e.g. Pinterest), in order to augment their internal customer database. This study is original in that it is the first that assesses the added value of pictorial stimulus-choice data in predictive models. This is important because more and more social media websites are focusing on pictures

Negative Link Prediction in Social Media

Signed network analysis has attracted increasing attention in recent years. This is in part because research on signed network analysis suggests that negative links have added value in the analytical process. A major impediment in their effective use is that most social media sites do not enable users to specify them explicitly. In other words, a gap exists between the importance of negative links and their availability in real data sets. Therefore, it is natural to explore whether one can predict negative links automatically from the commonly available social network data. In this paper, we investigate the novel problem of negative link prediction with only positive links and content-centric interactions in social media. We make a number of important observations about negative links, and propose a principled framework NeLP, which can exploit positive links and content-centric interactions to predict negative links. Our experimental results on real-world social networks demonstrate that the proposed NeLP framework can accurately predict negative links with positive links and content-centric interactions. Our detailed experiments also illustrate the relative importance of various factors to the effectiveness of the proposed framework