Predicting user demographics based on interest analysis

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel framework that uses user ratings to predict demographics, achieving higher accuracy and efficiency by classifying items and reducing data volume, with potential applications in personalization.

Contribution

First to employ item ratings for demographic prediction, improving accuracy and reducing data requirements in user profiling tasks.

Findings

Using all ratings improves prediction accuracy by at least 16%.

Classifying items as popular/unpopular reduces data volume significantly.

The framework maintains acceptable accuracy with only 5% of item ratings.

Abstract

These days, due to the increasing amount of information generated on the web, most web service providers try to personalize their services. Users also interact with web-based systems in multiple ways and state their interests and preferences by rating the provided items. This paper proposes a framework to predict users' demographic based on ratings registered by users in a system. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that the item ratings are employed for users' demographic prediction problems, which have extensively been studied in recommendation systems and service personalization. We apply the framework to the Movielens dataset's ratings and predict users' age and gender. The experimental results show that using all ratings registered by users improves the prediction accuracy by at least 16% compared with previously studied models. Moreover, by classifying the items as popular and unpopular, we eliminate ratings that belong to 95% of items and still reach an acceptable level of accuracy. This significantly reduces update costs in a time-varying environment. Besides this classification, we propose other methods to reduce data volume while keeping the predictions accurate.