Generative models for item adoptions using social correlation

• Main Authors: CHUA, Freddy Chong Tat, LAUW, Hady Wirawan, LIM, Ee Peng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Data mining; Database applications; Database management; Information technology and systems; Mining methods and algorithms; Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1550; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2549/viewcontent/GenerativeModelsItemAdoptionsSocialCorrelation_2013_afv.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Users face many choices on the Web when it comes to choosing which product to buy, which video to watch, etc. In making adoption decisions, users rely not only on their own preferences, but also on friends. We call the latter social correlation which may be caused by the homophily and social influence effects. In this paper, we focus on modeling social correlation on users’ item adoptions. Given a user-user social graph and an item-user adoption graph, our research seeks to answer the following questions: whether the items adopted by a user correlate to items adopted by her friends, and how to model item adoptions using social correlation. We propose a social correlation framework that considers a social correlation matrix representing the degrees of correlation from every user to the user's friends, in addition to a set of latent factors representing topics of interests of individual users. Based on the framework, we develop two generative models, namely sequential and unified, and the corresponding parameter estimation approaches. From each model, we devise the social correlation only and hybrid methods for predicting missing adoption links. Experiments on LiveJournal and Epinions data sets show that our proposed models outperform the approach based on latent factors only (LDA).