18 research outputs found
Towards Psychometrics-based Friend Recommendations in Social Networking Services
Two of the defining elements of Social Networking Services are the social
profile, containing information about the user, and the social graph,
containing information about the connections between users. Social Networking
Services are used to connect to known people as well as to discover new
contacts. Current friend recommendation mechanisms typically utilize the social
graph. In this paper, we argue that psychometrics, the field of measuring
personality traits, can help make meaningful friend recommendations based on an
extended social profile containing collected smartphone sensor data. This will
support the development of highly distributed Social Networking Services
without central knowledge of the social graph.Comment: Accepted for publication at the 2017 International Conference on AI &
Mobile Services (IEEE AIMS
Personalized Degrees: Effects on Link Formation in Dynamic Networks from an Egocentric Perspective
Understanding mechanisms driving link formation in dynamic social networks is
a long-standing problem that has implications to understanding social structure
as well as link prediction and recommendation. Social networks exhibit a high
degree of transitivity, which explains the successes of common neighbor-based
methods for link prediction. In this paper, we examine mechanisms behind link
formation from the perspective of an ego node. We introduce the notion of
personalized degree for each neighbor node of the ego, which is the number of
other neighbors a particular neighbor is connected to. From empirical analyses
on four on-line social network datasets, we find that neighbors with higher
personalized degree are more likely to lead to new link formations when they
serve as common neighbors with other nodes, both in undirected and directed
settings. This is complementary to the finding of Adamic and Adar that neighbor
nodes with higher (global) degree are less likely to lead to new link
formations. Furthermore, on directed networks, we find that personalized
out-degree has a stronger effect on link formation than personalized in-degree,
whereas global in-degree has a stronger effect than global out-degree. We
validate our empirical findings through several link recommendation experiments
and observe that incorporating both personalized and global degree into link
recommendation greatly improves accuracy.Comment: To appear at the 10th International Workshop on Modeling Social Media
co-located with the Web Conference 201
Co-Following on Twitter
We present an in-depth study of co-following on Twitter based on the
observation that two Twitter users whose followers have similar friends are
also similar, even though they might not share any direct links or a single
mutual follower. We show how this observation contributes to (i) a better
understanding of language-agnostic user classification on Twitter, (ii)
eliciting opportunities for Computational Social Science, and (iii) improving
online marketing by identifying cross-selling opportunities.
We start with a machine learning problem of predicting a user's preference
among two alternative choices of Twitter friends. We show that co-following
information provides strong signals for diverse classification tasks and that
these signals persist even when (i) the most discriminative features are
removed and (ii) only relatively "sparse" users with fewer than 152 but more
than 43 Twitter friends are considered.
Going beyond mere classification performance optimization, we present
applications of our methodology to Computational Social Science. Here we
confirm stereotypes such as that the country singer Kenny Chesney
(@kennychesney) is more popular among @GOP followers, whereas Lady Gaga
(@ladygaga) enjoys more support from @TheDemocrats followers.
In the domain of marketing we give evidence that celebrity endorsement is
reflected in co-following and we demonstrate how our methodology can be used to
reveal the audience similarities between Apple and Puma and, less obviously,
between Nike and Coca-Cola. Concerning a user's popularity we find a
statistically significant connection between having a more "average"
followership and having more followers than direct rivals. Interestingly, a
\emph{larger} audience also seems to be linked to a \emph{less diverse}
audience in terms of their co-following.Comment: full version of a short paper at Hypertext 201
Popularity Prediction
With the rise in popularity of the Internet, data describing unique types of items has been collected into easy to access sources. Using this newly acquired data, is it possible to predict if an item will become a bestseller while another fade away with time? Popularity prediction is a problem that has attracted a great deal of research recently, and for good reason. The ability to predict an items future rise to popularity or fall to obscurity is a possibly priceless skill and sought out in many different industries such as sales, investments, and marketing. This report enumerates and analyzes a number of factors assumed to be an indicator of popularity. Additionally, we propose a number of popularity prediction methods, and evaluate using a cohost of evaluation metrics, and state of the art baselines. Our findings show promising potential for popularity prediction, based on a combination of structural and temporal properties indicative of popularity. The key proposed metrics include a measure of similarity between two items, and various definitions of popularity evolving with time. Experiments on a large scale real dataset from Yelp allow us to demonstrate the performance of our methods on predicting the popularity of businesses. We believe the methods described below can be extended to be used for diverse types of data