Automatically Infer Human Traits and Behavior from Social Media Data

TL;DR

This paper reviews recent machine learning methods for inferring human traits and behaviors from social media data, highlighting its potential as a rich source for behavioral analysis.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive survey of recent approaches and discusses future research directions in inferring human traits from social media.

Findings

Social media data offers rich behavioral insights.

Machine learning effectively infers human traits.

Future research can enhance inference accuracy.

Abstract

Given the complexity of human minds and their behavioral flexibility, it requires sophisticated data analysis to sift through a large amount of human behavioral evidence to model human minds and to predict human behavior. People currently spend a significant amount of time on social media such as Twitter and Facebook. Thus many aspects of their lives and behaviors have been digitally captured and continuously archived on these platforms. This makes social media a great source of large, rich and diverse human behavioral evidence. In this paper, we survey the recent work on applying machine learning to infer human traits and behavior from social media data. We will also point out several future research directions.