Towards social user profiling: Unified and discriminative influence model for inferring home locations

Rui Li, Shengjie Wang, Hongbo Deng, Rui Wang, Kevin Chen Chuan Chang

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Users' locations are important to many applications such as targeted advertisement and news recommendation. In this paper, we focus on the problem of profiling users' home locations in the context of social network (Twitter). The problem is nontrivial, because signals, which may help to identify a user's location, are scarce and noisy. We propose a unified discriminative influence model, named as UDI, to solve the problem. To overcome the challenge of scarce signals, UDI integrates signals observed from both social network (friends) and user-centric data (tweets) in a unified probabilistic framework. To overcome the challenge of noisy signals, UDI captures how likely a user connects to a signal with respect to 1) the distance between the user and the signal, and 2) the influence scope of the signal. Based on the model, we develop local and global location prediction methods. The experiments on a large scale data set show that our methods improve the state-of-the-art methods by 13%, and achieve the best performance.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationKDD'12 - 18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining
Pages1023-1031
Number of pages9
DOIs
StatePublished - 2012
Event18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2012 - Beijing, China
Duration: Aug 12 2012Aug 16 2012

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining

Other

Other18th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2012
Country/TerritoryChina
CityBeijing
Period8/12/128/16/12

Keywords

  • influence model
  • location profiling
  • social network

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Information Systems

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