11 research outputs found
Social Dynamics of Digg
Online social media provide multiple ways to find interesting content. One
important method is highlighting content recommended by user's friends. We
examine this process on one such site, the news aggregator Digg. With a
stochastic model of user behavior, we distinguish the effects of the content
visibility and interestingness to users. We find a wide range of interest and
distinguish stories primarily of interest to a users' friends from those of
interest to the entire user community. We show how this model predicts a
story's eventual popularity from users' early reactions to it, and estimate the
prediction reliability. This modeling framework can help evaluate alternative
design choices for displaying content on the site.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1010.023
Modeling and Predicting Popularity Dynamics via Reinforced Poisson Processes
An ability to predict the popularity dynamics of individual items within a
complex evolving system has important implications in an array of areas. Here
we propose a generative probabilistic framework using a reinforced Poisson
process to model explicitly the process through which individual items gain
their popularity. This model distinguishes itself from existing models via its
capability of modeling the arrival process of popularity and its remarkable
power at predicting the popularity of individual items. It possesses the
flexibility of applying Bayesian treatment to further improve the predictive
power using a conjugate prior. Extensive experiments on a longitudinal citation
dataset demonstrate that this model consistently outperforms existing
popularity prediction methods.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figure; 3 table
Real-Time Prediction of Gamers Behavior Using Variable Order Markov and Big Data Technology: A Case of Study
This paper presents the results and conclusions
found when predicting the behavior of gamers in commercial
videogames datasets. In particular, it uses Variable-Order Markov
(VOM) to build a probabilistic model that is able to use the historic
behavior of gamers and to infer what will be their next actions.
Being able to predict with accuracy the next user’s actions can be
of special interest to learn from the behavior of gamers, to make
them more engaged and to reduce churn rate. In order to support
a big volume and velocity of data, the system is built on top of
the Hadoop ecosystem, using HBase for real-time processing; and
the prediction tool is provided as a service (SaaS) and accessible
through a RESTful API. The prediction system is evaluated using a
case of study with two commercial videogames, attaining promising
results with high prediction accuracies
Early Warning Analysis for Social Diffusion Events
There is considerable interest in developing predictive capabilities for
social diffusion processes, for instance to permit early identification of
emerging contentious situations, rapid detection of disease outbreaks, or
accurate forecasting of the ultimate reach of potentially viral ideas or
behaviors. This paper proposes a new approach to this predictive analytics
problem, in which analysis of meso-scale network dynamics is leveraged to
generate useful predictions for complex social phenomena. We begin by deriving
a stochastic hybrid dynamical systems (S-HDS) model for diffusion processes
taking place over social networks with realistic topologies; this modeling
approach is inspired by recent work in biology demonstrating that S-HDS offer a
useful mathematical formalism with which to represent complex, multi-scale
biological network dynamics. We then perform formal stochastic reachability
analysis with this S-HDS model and conclude that the outcomes of social
diffusion processes may depend crucially upon the way the early dynamics of the
process interacts with the underlying network's community structure and
core-periphery structure. This theoretical finding provides the foundations for
developing a machine learning algorithm that enables accurate early warning
analysis for social diffusion events. The utility of the warning algorithm, and
the power of network-based predictive metrics, are demonstrated through an
empirical investigation of the propagation of political memes over social media
networks. Additionally, we illustrate the potential of the approach for
security informatics applications through case studies involving early warning
analysis of large-scale protests events and politically-motivated cyber
attacks
Leveraging Sociological Models for Predictive Analytics
Abstract—There is considerable interest in developing techniques for predicting human behavior, for instance to enable emerging contentious situations to be forecast or the nature of ongoing but “hidden ” activities to be inferred. A promising approach to this problem is to identify and collect appropriate empirical data and then apply machine learning methods to these data to generate the predictions. This paper shows the performance of such learning algorithms often can be improved substantially by leveraging sociological models in their development and implementation. In particular, we demonstrate that sociologically-grounded learning algorithms outperform gold-standard methods in three important and challenging tasks: 1.) inferring the (unobserved) nature of relationships in adversarial social networks, 2.) predicting whether nascent social diffusion events will “go viral”, and 3.) anticipating and defending future actions of opponents in adversarial settings. Significantly, the new algorithms perform well even when there is limited data available for their training and execution. Keywords—predictive analysis, sociological models, social networks, empirical analysis, machine learning. I
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Will they come and will they stay? Online Social Networks and news consumption on external websites
This study explores the role of online engagement, homophily and social influence in explaining traffic and news consumption by social network users at an external news website. The authors jointly model visits and page views for a panel of users who registered with the news site using their Facebook accounts. In their model, the authors account for homophily using a latent space approach, and account for endogeneity, heterogeneity, and unobservable correlates. The results show that measures of an individual’s activity on Facebook are positively associated with that individual’s actions at the news site. In addition, knowing what a user’s Facebook friends do at the content website provides insights into a focal user’s behavior at that website, as visitors with friends who visit external news sites are more likely to visit the news website studied. In addition, news consumption (not just visits) also depends on friend’s actions but such an impact varies with the individual’s underlying browsing mode. We highlight the importance of social influence in news consumption and further show that homophily bias in news consumption is similar to prior research in other categories. Our study also highlights that visitors’ past browsing patterns are important predictors of future content consumption, although social network information significantly improves prediction beyond the effect of such more traditional behavioral metrics. Finally, we find that Managers can use readily available data for both prediction and targeting
Characterizing Popularity Dynamics of User-generated Videos: A Category-based Study of YouTube
Understanding the growth pattern of content popularity has become a subject of immense interest to
Internet service providers, content makers and on-line advertisers. This understanding is also important for
the sustainable development of content distribution systems. As an approach to comprehend the characteristics of this growth pattern, a significant amount of research has been done in analyzing the popularity
growth patterns of YouTube videos. Unfortunately, no work has been done that intensively investigates the
popularity patterns of YouTube videos based on video object category. In this thesis, an in-depth analysis
of the popularity pattern of YouTube videos is performed, considering the categories of videos.
Metadata and request patterns were collected by employing category-specific YouTube crawlers. The
request patterns were observed for a period of five months. Results confirm that the time varying popularity
of di fferent YouTube categories are conspicuously diff erent, in spite of having sets of categories with very
similar viewing patterns. In particular, News and Sports exhibit similar growth curves, as do Music and
Film.
While for some categories views at early ages can be used to predict future popularity, for some others
predicting future popularity is a challenging task and require more sophisticated techniques, e.g., time-series clustering. The outcomes of these analyses are instrumental towards designing a reliable workload generator, which can be further used to evaluate diff erent caching policies for YouTube and similar sites. In this
thesis, workload generators for four of the YouTube categories are developed. Performance of these workload generators suggest that a complete category-specific workload generator can be developed using time-series clustering. Patterns of users' interaction with YouTube videos are also analyzed from a dataset collected in a local network. This shows the possible ways of improving the performance of Peer-to-Peer video distribution
technique along with a new video recommendation method