Mitigating Overexposure in Viral Marketing

In traditional models for word-of-mouth recommendations and viral marketing, the objective function has generally been based on reaching as many people as possible. However, a number of studies have shown that the indiscriminate spread of a product by word-of-mouth can result in overexposure, reaching people who evaluate it negatively. This can lead to an effect in which the over-promotion of a product can produce negative reputational effects, by reaching a part of the audience that is not receptive to it. How should one make use of social influence when there is a risk of overexposure? In this paper, we develop and analyze a theoretical model for this process; we show how it captures a number of the qualitative phenomena associated with overexposure, and for the main formulation of our model, we provide a polynomial-time algorithm to find the optimal marketing strategy. We also present simulations of the model on real network topologies, quantifying the extent to which our optimal strategies outperform natural baselinesComment: In AAAI-1

On Learning to Rank Long Sequences with Contextual Bandits

Motivated by problems of learning to rank long item sequences, we introduce a variant of the cascading bandit model that considers flexible length sequences with varying rewards and losses. We formulate two generative models for this problem within the generalized linear setting, and design and analyze upper confidence algorithms for it. Our analysis delivers tight regret bounds which, when specialized to vanilla cascading bandits, results in sharper guarantees than previously available in the literature. We evaluate our algorithms on a number of real-world datasets, and show significantly improved empirical performance as compared to known cascading bandit baselines

DeePOF: A hybrid approach of deep convolutional neural network and friendship to Point‐of‐Interest (POI) recommendation system in location‐based social networks

Today, millions of active users spend a percentage of their time on location-based social networks like Yelp and Gowalla and share their rich information. They can easily learn about their friends\u27 behaviors and where they are visiting and be influenced by their style. As a result, the existence of personalized recommendations and the investigation of meaningful features of users and Point of Interests (POIs), given the challenges of rich contents and data sparsity, is a substantial task to accurately recommend the POIs and interests of users in location-based social networks (LBSNs). This work proposes a novel pipeline of POI recommendations named DeePOF based on deep learning and the convolutional neural network. This approach only takes into consideration the influence of the most similar pattern of friendship instead of the friendship of all users. The mean-shift clustering technique is used to detect similarity. The most similar friends\u27 spatial and temporal features are fed into our deep CNN technique. The output of several proposed layers can predict latitude and longitude and the ID of subsequent appropriate places, and then using the friendship interval of a similar pattern, the lowest distance venues are chosen. This combination method is estimated on two popular datasets of LBSNs. Experimental results demonstrate that analyzing similar friendships could make recommendations more accurate and the suggested model for recommending a sequence of top-k POIs outperforms state-of-the-art approaches

RecPOID: POI Recommendation with Friendship Aware and Deep CNN

In location-based social networks (LBSNs), exploit several key features of points-of-interest (POIs) and users on precise POI recommendation be significant. In this work, a novel POI recommenda-tion pipeline based on the convolutional neural network named RecPOID is proposed, which can recommend an accurate sequence of top-k POIs and considers only the effect of the most similar pattern friendship rather than all user’s friendship. We use the fuzzy c-mean clustering method to find the similarity. Temporal and spatial features of similar friends are fed to our Deep CNN model. The 10-layer convolutional neural network can predict longitude and latitude and the Id of the next proper locations; after that, based on the shortest time distance from a similar pattern’s friendship, select the smallest distance locations. The proposed structure uses six features, includ-ing user’s ID, month, day, hour, minute, and second of visiting time by each user as inputs. RecPOID based on two accessible LBSNs datasets is evaluated. Experimental outcomes illustrate considering most similar friendship could improve the accuracy of recommendations and the proposed RecPOID for POI recommendation outperforms state-of-the-art approaches