User interest prediction over future unobserved topics on social networks

Abstract

The accurate prediction of users’ future interests on social networks allows one to perform future planning by studying how users will react if certain topics emerge in the future. It can improve areas such as targeted advertising and the efficient delivery of services. Despite the importance of predicting user future interests on social networks, existing works mainly focus on identifying user current interests and little work has been done on the prediction of user potential interests in the future. There have been work that attempt to identify a user future interests, however they cannot predict user interests with regard to new topics since these topics have never received any feedback from users in the past. In this paper, we propose a framework that works on the basis of temporal evolution of user interests and utilizes semantic information from knowledge bases such as Wikipedia to predict user future interests and overcome the cold item problem. Through extensive experiments on a real-world Twitter dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in predicting future interests of users compared to state-of-the-art baselines. Moreover, we further show that the impact of our work is especially meaningful when considered in case of cold items.