AI Seminar: Social Correlation of Item Adoptions in the Digital World
- When:
- Wednesday, April 25, 2012, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm
- Where:
- 11th Floor Conf. Room (#1135)
- Speaker:
- Hady Lauw
- Description:
Abstract:
The notion of social correlation in the digital world is grounded in the following central questions. Are two users more likely to be friends if they share common interests? Are two users more likely to share common interests if they’re friends? To answer these questions, we explore the effects of social correlation on users' adoption of items. Given a user-user social graph and an item-user adoption graph, we seek to incorporate social correlation in order to improve prediction of unobserved item adoptions. We design a generative model that decomposes the adoption graph into a set of latent factors reflecting user preferences, and a social correlation matrix reflecting the degree of correlation from one user to another. This matrix is learned (rather than pre-assigned), has probabilistic interpretation, and preserves the underlying social network structure. Experiments on real-life data show that our proposed models outperform the approach based on latent factors only, showing that indeed social correlation plays a role in users' adoption of items.
About the speaker:
Hady Lauw is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information Systems, Singapore Management University. Previously, he was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley, and then a Scientist at A*STAR's Institute for Infocomm Research. His research focuses on the areas of social network mining, as well as Web information mining. He earned his Ph.D. and B.Eng (1st Class) degrees from Nanyang Technological University.
