THE DESIGN OF A NETWORK-BASED MODEL FOR BUSINESS PERFORMANCE PREDICTION

While much research work has been devoted to analysis and prediction of individuals’ behavior in social networks, very few studies about the analysis of business networks are conducted. Empowered by recent research on automated mining of business networks, this paper illustrates the design of a novel business network-based model called Energy Cascading Model (ECM) for the analysis and prediction of business performance using the proxies of stock prices. More specifically, the proposed prediction model takes into account both influential business relationships and twitter sentiments of firms to infer their stock price movements. Our empirical experiments based on a publicly available financial corpus and social media postings reveal that the proposed ECM model is effective for the prediction of directional stock price movements. The business implication of our research is that business managers can apply our design artifacts to more effectively analyze and predict the potential business performance of targeted firms

Knowing your FATE: Friendship, Action and Temporal Explanations for User Engagement Prediction on Social Apps

With the rapid growth and prevalence of social network applications (Apps) in recent years, understanding user engagement has become increasingly important, to provide useful insights for future App design and development. While several promising neural modeling approaches were recently pioneered for accurate user engagement prediction, their black-box designs are unfortunately limited in model explainability. In this paper, we study a novel problem of explainable user engagement prediction for social network Apps. First, we propose a flexible definition of user engagement for various business scenarios, based on future metric expectations. Next, we design an end-to-end neural framework, FATE, which incorporates three key factors that we identify to influence user engagement, namely friendships, user actions, and temporal dynamics to achieve explainable engagement predictions. FATE is based on a tensor-based graph neural network (GNN), LSTM and a mixture attention mechanism, which allows for (a) predictive explanations based on learned weights across different feature categories, (b) reduced network complexity, and (c) improved performance in both prediction accuracy and training/inference time. We conduct extensive experiments on two large-scale datasets from Snapchat, where FATE outperforms state-of-the-art approaches by ${\approx}10\%$ error and ${\approx}20\%$ runtime reduction. We also evaluate explanations from FATE, showing strong quantitative and qualitative performance.Comment: Accepted to KDD 2020 Applied Data Science Trac

QoE estimation in mobile networks using machine learning

Quality of experience (QoE) can be defined as the overall level of acceptability of an application or service, as perceived by the end-user. The perceived QoE of mobile user plays a key role in the business of the telecom carriers. This work has focused in design a model capable of predicting the QoE of the end-user using a number of Machine Learning approaches, based on quality of service (QoS) metrics from different sources like the mobile device, the mobile network and also subjective metrics given by the user (QoE and Mood surveys) in a real life setup. An android app, a metric collection platform, a system for data processing and semi-automatic analysis of metrics has been developed as a part of this work. The experimental results show that by assembling a combined model of the algorithms with best observed individual performance, improvements in the overall performance of the prediction can be achieved.CONACYT – Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y TecnologíaPROCIENCI

Real or not? Identifying untrustworthy news websites using third-party partnerships

Untrustworthy content such as fake news and clickbait have become a pervasive problem on the Internet, causing significant socio-political problems around the world. Identifying untrustworthy content is a crucial step in countering them. The current best-practices for identification involve content analysis and arduous fact-checking of the content. To complement content analysis, we propose examining websites? third-parties to identify their trustworthiness. Websites utilize third-parties, also known as their digital supply chains, to create and present content and help the website function. Third-parties are an important indication of a website?s business model. Similar websites exhibit similarities in the third-parties they use. Using this perspective, we use machine learning and heuristic methods to discern similarities and dissimilarities in third-party usage, which we use to predict trustworthiness of websites. We demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach in predicting trustworthiness of websites from a database of News, Fake News, and Clickbait websites. Our approach can be easily and cost-effectively implemented to reinforce current identification methods

GNN-GMVO: Graph Neural Networks for Optimizing Gross Merchandise Value in Similar Item Recommendation

Similar item recommendation is a critical task in the e-Commerce industry, which helps customers explore similar and relevant alternatives based on their interested products. Despite the traditional machine learning models, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), by design, can understand complex relations like similarity between products. However, in contrast to their wide usage in retrieval tasks and their focus on optimizing the relevance, the current GNN architectures are not tailored toward maximizing revenue-related objectives such as Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), which is one of the major business metrics for e-Commerce companies. In addition, defining accurate edge relations in GNNs is non-trivial in large-scale e-Commerce systems, due to the heterogeneity nature of the item-item relationships. This work aims to address these issues by designing a new GNN architecture called GNN-GMVO (Graph Neural Network - Gross Merchandise Value Optimizer). This model directly optimizes GMV while considering the complex relations between items. In addition, we propose a customized edge construction method to tailor the model toward similar item recommendation task and alleviate the noisy and complex item-item relations. In our comprehensive experiments on three real-world datasets, we show higher prediction performance and expected GMV for top ranked items recommended by our model when compared with selected state-of-the-art benchmark models.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, 43 citation