6,441 research outputs found
The Dynamics of Viral Marketing
We present an analysis of a person-to-person recommendation network,
consisting of 4 million people who made 16 million recommendations on half a
million products. We observe the propagation of recommendations and the cascade
sizes, which we explain by a simple stochastic model. We analyze how user
behavior varies within user communities defined by a recommendation network.
Product purchases follow a 'long tail' where a significant share of purchases
belongs to rarely sold items. We establish how the recommendation network grows
over time and how effective it is from the viewpoint of the sender and receiver
of the recommendations. While on average recommendations are not very effective
at inducing purchases and do not spread very far, we present a model that
successfully identifies communities, product and pricing categories for which
viral marketing seems to be very effective
Who are Like-minded: Mining User Interest Similarity in Online Social Networks
In this paper, we mine and learn to predict how similar a pair of users'
interests towards videos are, based on demographic (age, gender and location)
and social (friendship, interaction and group membership) information of these
users. We use the video access patterns of active users as ground truth (a form
of benchmark). We adopt tag-based user profiling to establish this ground
truth, and justify why it is used instead of video-based methods, or many
latent topic models such as LDA and Collaborative Filtering approaches. We then
show the effectiveness of the different demographic and social features, and
their combinations and derivatives, in predicting user interest similarity,
based on different machine-learning methods for combining multiple features. We
propose a hybrid tree-encoded linear model for combining the features, and show
that it out-performs other linear and treebased models. Our methods can be used
to predict user interest similarity when the ground-truth is not available,
e.g. for new users, or inactive users whose interests may have changed from old
access data, and is useful for video recommendation. Our study is based on a
rich dataset from Tencent, a popular service provider of social networks, video
services, and various other services in China
CAM2: Conformity-Aware Multi-Task Ranking Model for Large-Scale Recommender Systems
Learning large-scale industrial recommender system models by fitting them to
historical user interaction data makes them vulnerable to conformity bias. This
may be due to a number of factors, including the fact that user interests may
be difficult to determine and that many items are often interacted with based
on ecosystem factors other than their relevance to the individual user. In this
work, we introduce CAM2, a conformity-aware multi-task ranking model to serve
relevant items to users on one of the largest industrial recommendation
platforms. CAM2 addresses these challenges systematically by leveraging causal
modeling to disentangle users' conformity to popular items from their true
interests. This framework is generalizable and can be scaled to support
multiple representations of conformity and user relevance in any large-scale
recommender system. We provide deeper practical insights and demonstrate the
effectiveness of the proposed model through improvements in offline evaluation
metrics compared to our production multi-task ranking model. We also show
through online experiments that the CAM2 model results in a significant 0.50%
increase in aggregated user engagement, coupled with a 0.21% increase in daily
active users on Facebook Watch, a popular video discovery and sharing platform
serving billions of users.Comment: Accepted by WWW 202
Image-based Recommendations on Styles and Substitutes
Humans inevitably develop a sense of the relationships between objects, some
of which are based on their appearance. Some pairs of objects might be seen as
being alternatives to each other (such as two pairs of jeans), while others may
be seen as being complementary (such as a pair of jeans and a matching shirt).
This information guides many of the choices that people make, from buying
clothes to their interactions with each other. We seek here to model this human
sense of the relationships between objects based on their appearance. Our
approach is not based on fine-grained modeling of user annotations but rather
on capturing the largest dataset possible and developing a scalable method for
uncovering human notions of the visual relationships within. We cast this as a
network inference problem defined on graphs of related images, and provide a
large-scale dataset for the training and evaluation of the same. The system we
develop is capable of recommending which clothes and accessories will go well
together (and which will not), amongst a host of other applications.Comment: 11 pages, 10 figures, SIGIR 201
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