Latent Space Model for Multi-Modal Social Data

TL;DR

This paper introduces CLSM, a novel multi-modal latent space model that jointly captures social interactions and user behaviors, enabling improved prediction accuracy across various large-scale social datasets.

Contribution

The paper proposes CLSM, a generalized framework combining MMSB and LDA with a constraint for multi-modal data, along with an efficient inference algorithm for massive datasets.

Findings

Significant improvement in prediction accuracy over existing methods.

Effective modeling of multi-modal social data across diverse platforms.

Scalable inference algorithm with linear computational cost.

Abstract

With the emergence of social networking services, researchers enjoy the increasing availability of large-scale heterogenous datasets capturing online user interactions and behaviors. Traditional analysis of techno-social systems data has focused mainly on describing either the dynamics of social interactions, or the attributes and behaviors of the users. However, overwhelming empirical evidence suggests that the two dimensions affect one another, and therefore they should be jointly modeled and analyzed in a multi-modal framework. The benefits of such an approach include the ability to build better predictive models, leveraging social network information as well as user behavioral signals. To this purpose, here we propose the Constrained Latent Space Model (CLSM), a generalized framework that combines Mixed Membership Stochastic Blockmodels (MMSB) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) incorporating a constraint that forces the latent space to concurrently describe the multiple data modalities. We derive an efficient inference algorithm based on Variational Expectation Maximization that has a computational cost linear in the size of the network, thus making it feasible to analyze massive social datasets. We validate the proposed framework on two problems: prediction of social interactions from user attributes and behaviors, and behavior prediction exploiting network information. We perform experiments with a variety of multi-modal social systems, spanning location-based social networks (Gowalla), social media services (Instagram, Orkut), e-commerce and review sites (Amazon, Ciao), and finally citation networks (Cora). The results indicate significant improvement in prediction accuracy over state of the art methods, and demonstrate the flexibility of the proposed approach for addressing a variety of different learning problems commonly occurring with multi-modal social data.