40,417 research outputs found
Beyond Classification: Latent User Interests Profiling from Visual Contents Analysis
User preference profiling is an important task in modern online social
networks (OSN). With the proliferation of image-centric social platforms, such
as Pinterest, visual contents have become one of the most informative data
streams for understanding user preferences. Traditional approaches usually
treat visual content analysis as a general classification problem where one or
more labels are assigned to each image. Although such an approach simplifies
the process of image analysis, it misses the rich context and visual cues that
play an important role in people's perception of images. In this paper, we
explore the possibilities of learning a user's latent visual preferences
directly from image contents. We propose a distance metric learning method
based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to directly extract
similarity information from visual contents and use the derived distance metric
to mine individual users' fine-grained visual preferences. Through our
preliminary experiments using data from 5,790 Pinterest users, we show that
even for the images within the same category, each user possesses distinct and
individually-identifiable visual preferences that are consistent over their
lifetime. Our results underscore the untapped potential of finer-grained visual
preference profiling in understanding users' preferences.Comment: 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Data Mining Workshop
No stratification without representation
Sortition is an alternative approach to democracy, in which representatives are not elected but randomly selected from the population. Most electoral democracies fail to accurately represent even a handful of protected groups. By contrast, sortition guarantees that every subset of the population will in expectation fill their fair share of the available positions. This fairness property remains satisfied when the sample is stratified based on known features. Moreover, stratification can greatly reduce the variance in the number of positions filled by any unknown group, as long as this group correlates with the strata. Our main result is that stratification cannot increase this variance by more than a negligible factor, even in the presence of indivisibilities and rounding. When the unknown group is unevenly spread across strata, we give a guarantee on the reduction in variance with respect to uniform sampling. We also contextualize stratification and uniform sampling in the space of fair sampling algorithms. Finally, we apply our insights to an empirical case study.Accepted manuscrip
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