3,340 research outputs found
Modeling Adoption and Usage of Competing Products
The emergence and wide-spread use of online social networks has led to a
dramatic increase on the availability of social activity data. Importantly,
this data can be exploited to investigate, at a microscopic level, some of the
problems that have captured the attention of economists, marketers and
sociologists for decades, such as, e.g., product adoption, usage and
competition.
In this paper, we propose a continuous-time probabilistic model, based on
temporal point processes, for the adoption and frequency of use of competing
products, where the frequency of use of one product can be modulated by those
of others. This model allows us to efficiently simulate the adoption and
recurrent usages of competing products, and generate traces in which we can
easily recognize the effect of social influence, recency and competition. We
then develop an inference method to efficiently fit the model parameters by
solving a convex program. The problem decouples into a collection of smaller
subproblems, thus scaling easily to networks with hundred of thousands of
nodes. We validate our model over synthetic and real diffusion data gathered
from Twitter, and show that the proposed model does not only provides a good
fit to the data and more accurate predictions than alternatives but also
provides interpretable model parameters, which allow us to gain insights into
some of the factors driving product adoption and frequency of use
Submodular Inference of Diffusion Networks from Multiple Trees
Diffusion and propagation of information, influence and diseases take place
over increasingly larger networks. We observe when a node copies information,
makes a decision or becomes infected but networks are often hidden or
unobserved. Since networks are highly dynamic, changing and growing rapidly, we
only observe a relatively small set of cascades before a network changes
significantly. Scalable network inference based on a small cascade set is then
necessary for understanding the rapidly evolving dynamics that govern
diffusion. In this article, we develop a scalable approximation algorithm with
provable near-optimal performance based on submodular maximization which
achieves a high accuracy in such scenario, solving an open problem first
introduced by Gomez-Rodriguez et al (2010). Experiments on synthetic and real
diffusion data show that our algorithm in practice achieves an optimal
trade-off between accuracy and running time.Comment: To appear in the 29th International Conference on Machine Learning
(ICML), 2012. Website:
http://www.stanford.edu/~manuelgr/network-inference-multitree
Structure and Dynamics of Information Pathways in Online Media
Diffusion of information, spread of rumors and infectious diseases are all
instances of stochastic processes that occur over the edges of an underlying
network. Many times networks over which contagions spread are unobserved, and
such networks are often dynamic and change over time. In this paper, we
investigate the problem of inferring dynamic networks based on information
diffusion data. We assume there is an unobserved dynamic network that changes
over time, while we observe the results of a dynamic process spreading over the
edges of the network. The task then is to infer the edges and the dynamics of
the underlying network.
We develop an on-line algorithm that relies on stochastic convex optimization
to efficiently solve the dynamic network inference problem. We apply our
algorithm to information diffusion among 3.3 million mainstream media and blog
sites and experiment with more than 179 million different pieces of information
spreading over the network in a one year period. We study the evolution of
information pathways in the online media space and find interesting insights.
Information pathways for general recurrent topics are more stable across time
than for on-going news events. Clusters of news media sites and blogs often
emerge and vanish in matter of days for on-going news events. Major social
movements and events involving civil population, such as the Libyan's civil war
or Syria's uprise, lead to an increased amount of information pathways among
blogs as well as in the overall increase in the network centrality of blogs and
social media sites.Comment: To Appear at the 6th International Conference on Web Search and Data
Mining (WSDM '13
Quantifying Information Overload in Social Media and its Impact on Social Contagions
Information overload has become an ubiquitous problem in modern society.
Social media users and microbloggers receive an endless flow of information,
often at a rate far higher than their cognitive abilities to process the
information. In this paper, we conduct a large scale quantitative study of
information overload and evaluate its impact on information dissemination in
the Twitter social media site. We model social media users as information
processing systems that queue incoming information according to some policies,
process information from the queue at some unknown rates and decide to forward
some of the incoming information to other users. We show how timestamped data
about tweets received and forwarded by users can be used to uncover key
properties of their queueing policies and estimate their information processing
rates and limits. Such an understanding of users' information processing
behaviors allows us to infer whether and to what extent users suffer from
information overload.
Our analysis provides empirical evidence of information processing limits for
social media users and the prevalence of information overloading. The most
active and popular social media users are often the ones that are overloaded.
Moreover, we find that the rate at which users receive information impacts
their processing behavior, including how they prioritize information from
different sources, how much information they process, and how quickly they
process information. Finally, the susceptibility of a social media user to
social contagions depends crucially on the rate at which she receives
information. An exposure to a piece of information, be it an idea, a convention
or a product, is much less effective for users that receive information at
higher rates, meaning they need more exposures to adopt a particular contagion.Comment: To appear at ICSWM '1
Uncovering the Temporal Dynamics of Diffusion Networks
Time plays an essential role in the diffusion of information, influence and
disease over networks. In many cases we only observe when a node copies
information, makes a decision or becomes infected -- but the connectivity,
transmission rates between nodes and transmission sources are unknown.
Inferring the underlying dynamics is of outstanding interest since it enables
forecasting, influencing and retarding infections, broadly construed. To this
end, we model diffusion processes as discrete networks of continuous temporal
processes occurring at different rates. Given cascade data -- observed
infection times of nodes -- we infer the edges of the global diffusion network
and estimate the transmission rates of each edge that best explain the observed
data. The optimization problem is convex. The model naturally (without
heuristics) imposes sparse solutions and requires no parameter tuning. The
problem decouples into a collection of independent smaller problems, thus
scaling easily to networks on the order of hundreds of thousands of nodes.
Experiments on real and synthetic data show that our algorithm both recovers
the edges of diffusion networks and accurately estimates their transmission
rates from cascade data.Comment: To appear in the 28th International Conference on Machine Learning
(ICML), 2011. Website: http://www.stanford.edu/~manuelgr/netrate
Modeling Information Propagation with Survival Theory
Networks provide a skeleton for the spread of contagions, like, information,
ideas, behaviors and diseases. Many times networks over which contagions
diffuse are unobserved and need to be inferred. Here we apply survival theory
to develop general additive and multiplicative risk models under which the
network inference problems can be solved efficiently by exploiting their
convexity. Our additive risk model generalizes several existing network
inference models. We show all these models are particular cases of our more
general model. Our multiplicative model allows for modeling scenarios in which
a node can either increase or decrease the risk of activation of another node,
in contrast with previous approaches, which consider only positive risk
increments. We evaluate the performance of our network inference algorithms on
large synthetic and real cascade datasets, and show that our models are able to
predict the length and duration of cascades in real data.Comment: To appear at ICML '1
Productivity and Quality-Environmental Changes in Marketing Co-operatives: An Analysis on the Horticultural Sector
The object of the present paper is to analyse productivity incorporating quality-environmental changes in marketing co-operatives. Firstly, it reviews competitiveness factors in the current European agri-food market, especially in relation to the fruit and vegetables sector. Secondly, the productivity trend is studied empirically using nonparametric methods (Malmquist indices) and taking as reference panel data of Andalusian horticultural co-operatives for the period 1994-2001. For this purpose productivity is decomposed into technological change, efficiency and quality-environmental change. Additionally, the correlation of these results with other economic variables is analysed. The indicators obtained show a relevant increase in efficiency for the period under study and a high relationship between the results and product quality-environmental improvement.productivity, quality-environment, efficiency, marketing co-operative, horticultural sector, Agribusiness, Productivity Analysis, D24, Q13, Q21, L15,
Productivity and Environmental Performance in Marketing Cooperatives: Incentive Schemes on the Horticultural Sector
The object of the present paper is to analyze the productivity of marketing cooperatives incorporating environmental inputs/outputs. In the European agricultural policy, expectations for attaining sustainable and competitive agriculture lie to a great extent on the cooperative sector's ability to adapt to the new market conditions. These challenges have led marketing cooperatives in the fruit and vegetables sector to consider improvement in productivity and sound environmental performance. In this sector environmental management was intensified by the Common Agrarian Policy (CAP) through incentives on the so-called Operative Programs (OP). The present study analyses the total factor productivity (TFP) related to environmental variables in this sector using a parametric-stochastic approach and taking as reference a panel data of Spanish cooperatives for the period 1994-2002. Additionally, the determinants of productivity environmental indices are examined econ ometrically. The estimates obtained show a relevant increase in the efficiency component for the period under study and a relatively low impact of incentive schemes. However, they also show a relationship between productivity changes and several management factors in cooperatives, such as labor quality, capital intensity and environmental spillover.Productivity, environmental performance, parametric approach, efficiency, marketing cooperative, horticultural sector, Agribusiness, Environmental Economics and Policy, Productivity Analysis, D24, Q13, Q21, L15,
Environmental and Quality Improvement Practices: Their Analysis as Components of the Value Added in Horticultural Firms
This paper analyses the effect of environmental and quality improvement practices on the value added of the fruit and vegetable sector. These practices form part of the incentive-based programmes established by the Common Agricultural Policy. Taking the investment in quality-environmental activities as knowledge capital, we propose a specific analysis that evaluates the effect of the factors of the production function and of the current subsidies over the value added. In general, the share of quality environmental activities in the rise of the product's market value is quite high. The analysis reflects that the expenditure on these activities is still higher than their benefit, and that the current subsidies can hardly be considered encouraging factors for the development of the above-mentioned practices.Quality-environmental practices, investment incentives, horticultural firms, value added, Environmental Economics and Policy,
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