Social User Profiling: A Social-Aware Topic Modeling Perspective

Social user profiling is an analytical process that delivers an in-depth blueprint of users' personal characteristics in social networks,which can enable a wide range of applications,such as personalized recommendation and targeted marketing.While so-cial user profiling has attracted a lot of attention in the past few years,it is still very challenging to collaboratively model both user-centric information and social network structure.To this end,in this paper we develop an analytic framework for solving the social user profiling problem.Specifically,we first propose a novel social-aware semi-supervised topic model,i.e.,User Profiling based Topic Model(UPTM),which can rec-oncile the observed user characteristics and social network structure for discovering the latent reasons behind social connections and further extracting users' potential profiles.In addition,to improve the profiling performance,we further develop a label propaga-tion strategy for refining the profiling results of UPTM.Finally,we conduct extensive evaluations with a variety of real-world data,where experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed modeling method.