Breaking the habit: measuring and predicting departures from routine in individual human mobility

Researchers studying daily life mobility patterns have recently shown that humans are typically highly predictable in their movements. However, no existing work has examined the boundaries of this predictability, where human behaviour transitions temporarily from routine patterns to highly unpredictable states. To address this shortcoming, we tackle two interrelated challenges. First, we develop a novel information-theoretic metric, called instantaneous entropy, to analyse an individual’s mobility patterns and identify temporary departures from routine. Second, to predict such departures in the future, we propose the first Bayesian framework that explicitly models breaks from routine, showing that it outperforms current state-of-the-art predictor

Reliable online social network data collection

Large quantities of information are shared through online social networks, making them attractive sources of data for social network research. When studying the usage of online social networks, these data may not describe properly users’ behaviours. For instance, the data collected often include content shared by the users only, or content accessible to the researchers, hence obfuscating a large amount of data that would help understanding users’ behaviours and privacy concerns. Moreover, the data collection methods employed in experiments may also have an effect on data reliability when participants self-report inacurrate information or are observed while using a simulated application. Understanding the effects of these collection methods on data reliability is paramount for the study of social networks; for understanding user behaviour; for designing socially-aware applications and services; and for mining data collected from such social networks and applications. This chapter reviews previous research which has looked at social network data collection and user behaviour in these networks. We highlight shortcomings in the methods used in these studies, and introduce our own methodology and user study based on the Experience Sampling Method; we claim our methodology leads to the collection of more reliable data by capturing both those data which are shared and not shared. We conclude with suggestions for collecting and mining data from online social networks.Postprin

Lightweight Adaptation of Classifiers to Users and Contexts: Trends of the Emerging Domain

Intelligent computer applications need to adapt their behaviour to contexts and users, but conventional classifier adaptation methods require long data collection and/or training times. Therefore classifier adaptation is often performed as follows: at design time application developers define typical usage contexts and provide reasoning models for each of these contexts, and then at runtime an appropriate model is selected from available ones. Typically, definition of usage contexts and reasoning models heavily relies on domain knowledge. However, in practice many applications are used in so diverse situations that no developer can predict them all and collect for each situation adequate training and test databases. Such applications have to adapt to a new user or unknown context at runtime just from interaction with the user, preferably in fairly lightweight ways, that is, requiring limited user effort to collect training data and limited time of performing the adaptation. This paper analyses adaptation trends in several emerging domains and outlines promising ideas, proposed for making multimodal classifiers user-specific and context-specific without significant user efforts, detailed domain knowledge, and/or complete retraining of the classifiers. Based on this analysis, this paper identifies important application characteristics and presents guidelines to consider these characteristics in adaptation design

Does Pre-login Search Matter? Evidence from a Mobile Commerce Platform

An increasing number of consumers enjoy shopping through mobile devices. When consumers use a mobile app, they can choose whether to log in with their accounts. We argue that pre-login search plays a critical role in affecting consumers’ purchase decisions, although it has largely been overlooked in the literature. Using clickstream data, we adopt different econometric models to examine whether and how pre-login search affects the likelihood of purchase. Our results show that pre-login search behaviors are as important as post-login search to consumers’ purchase decisions. We also demonstrate that consumers’ purchase propensity increases at a diminishing rate with an increasing search effort during both pre- and post-login periods. Based on recommender systems (RSs) and paradox of choice theory, our results contribute to the burgeoning literature on consumer behavior in mobile commerce and provide novel insights to the strategic usage of RSs. Finally, we discuss theoretical and managerial implications