Product Adoption Maximization Leveraging Social Influence and User Interest Mining

Abstract

A Social Networking Service (SNS) platform provides digital footprints to discover users’ interests and track the social diffusion of product adoptions. How to identify a small set of seed users in a SNS who is potential to adopt a new promoting product with high probability, is a key question in social networks. Existing works approached this as a social influence maximization problem. However, these approaches relied heavily on text information for topic modeling and neglected the impact of seed users’ relation in the model. To this end, in this paper, we first develop a general product adoption function integrating both users’ interest and social influence, where the user interest model relies on historical user behavior and the seed users’ evaluations without any text information. Accordingly, we formulate a product adoption maximization problem and prove NP-hardness of this problem. We then design an efficient algorithm to solve this problem. We further devise a method to automatically learn the parameter in the proposed adoption function from users’ past behaviors. Finally, experimental results show the soundness of our proposed adoption decision function and the effectiveness of the proposed seed selection method for product adoption maximization.