Title:
Predictive models for online human activities

dc.contributor.advisor Zha, Hongyuan
dc.contributor.author Yang, Shuang-Hong en_US
dc.contributor.committeeMember Agichtein, Eugene
dc.contributor.committeeMember Lebanon, Guy
dc.contributor.committeeMember Song, Le
dc.contributor.committeeMember Yuan, Ming
dc.contributor.department Computing en_US
dc.date.accessioned 2012-06-06T16:48:58Z
dc.date.available 2012-06-06T16:48:58Z
dc.date.issued 2012-04-04 en_US
dc.description.abstract The availability and scale of user generated data in online systems raises tremendous challenges and opportunities to analytic study of human activities. Effective modeling of online human activities is not only fundamental to the understanding of human behavior, but also important to the online industry. This thesis focuses on developing models and algorithms to predict human activities in online systems and to improve the algorithmic design of personalized/socialized systems (e.g., recommendation, advertising, Web search systems). We are particularly interested in three types of online user activities, i.e., decision making, social interactions and user-generated contents. Centered around these activities, the thesis focuses on three challenging topics: 1. Behavior prediction, i.e., predicting users' online decisions. We present Collaborative-Competitive Filtering, a novel game-theoretic framework for predicting users' online decision making behavior and leverage the knowledge to optimize the design of online systems (e.g., recommendation systems) in respect of certain strategic goals (e.g., sales revenue, consumption diversity). 2. Social contagion, i.e., modeling the interplay between social interactions and individual behavior of decision making. We establish the joint Friendship-Interest Propagation model and the Behavior-Relation Interplay model, a series of statistical approaches to characterize the behavior of individual user's decision making, the interactions among socially connected users, and the interplay between these two activities. These techniques are demonstrated by applications to social behavior targeting. 3. Content mining, i.e., understanding user generated contents. We propose the Topic-Adapted Latent Dirichlet Allocation model, a probabilistic model for identifying a user's hidden cognitive aspects (e.g., knowledgability) from the texts created by the user. The model is successfully applied to address the challenge of ``language gap" in medical information retrieval. en_US
dc.description.degree PhD en_US
dc.identifier.uri http://hdl.handle.net/1853/43689
dc.publisher Georgia Institute of Technology en_US
dc.subject Social contagion en_US
dc.subject Collaborative competitive filtering en_US
dc.subject Social ties en_US
dc.subject Behavior prediction en_US
dc.subject User-generated data en_US
dc.subject Redictive models en_US
dc.subject Online human activities en_US
dc.subject Language gap en_US
dc.subject User cognitive aspects en_US
dc.subject Content mining en_US
dc.subject Behavior-relation interplay en_US
dc.subject.lcsh User-generated content
dc.subject.lcsh User interfaces (Computer systems)
dc.subject.lcsh Data mining
dc.title Predictive models for online human activities en_US
dc.type Text
dc.type.genre Dissertation
dspace.entity.type Publication
local.contributor.corporatename College of Computing
local.relation.ispartofseries Doctor of Philosophy with a Major in Computer Science
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication c8892b3c-8db6-4b7b-a33a-1b67f7db2021
relation.isSeriesOfPublication 41e6384f-fa8d-4c63-917f-a26900b10f64
Files
Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
yang_shuanghong_201205_phd.pdf
Size:
1.84 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Description: