User preference profiling is an important task in modern online social
networks (OSN). With the proliferation of image-centric social platforms, such
as Pinterest, visual contents have become one of the most informative data
streams for understanding user preferences. Traditional approaches usually
treat visual content analysis as a general classification problem where one or
more labels are assigned to each image. Although such an approach simplifies
the process of image analysis, it misses the rich context and visual cues that
play an important role in people's perception of images. In this paper, we
explore the possibilities of learning a user's latent visual preferences
directly from image contents. We propose a distance metric learning method
based on Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) to directly extract
similarity information from visual contents and use the derived distance metric
to mine individual users' fine-grained visual preferences. Through our
preliminary experiments using data from 5,790 Pinterest users, we show that
even for the images within the same category, each user possesses distinct and
individually-identifiable visual preferences that are consistent over their
lifetime. Our results underscore the untapped potential of finer-grained visual
preference profiling in understanding users' preferences.Comment: 2015 IEEE 15th International Conference on Data Mining Workshop