Predicting activity attendance in event-based social networks: content, context and social influence

The newly emerging event-based social networks (EBSNs) connect online and offline social interactions, offering a great opportunity to understand behaviors in the cyber-physical space. While existing efforts have mainly focused on investigating user behaviors in traditional social network services (SNS), this paper aims to exploit individual behaviors in EBSNs, which remains an unsolved problem. In particular, our method predicts activity attendance by discovering a set of factors that connect the physical and cyber spaces and influence individual's attendance of activities in EBSNs. These factors, including content preference, context (spatial and temporal) and social influence, are extracted using different models and techniques. We further propose a novel Singular Value Decomposition with Multi-Factor Neighborhood (SVD-MFN) algorithm to predict activity attendance by integrating the discovered heterogeneous factors into a single framework, in which these factors are fused through a neighborhood set. Experiments based on real-world data from Douban Events demonstrate that the proposed SVD-MFN algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art prediction methods.