Exploring the Impact of Dynamic Mutual Influence on Social Event Participation

Abstract

Nowadays, it is commonly seen that an offline social event is organized through online social network services (SNS), in this way cyber strangers can be connected in physical world. While there are some preliminary studies on social event participation through SNS, they usually have more focus on the mining of event profiles and have less focus on the social relationships among target users. In particular, the importance of dynamic mutual influence among potential event participants has been largely ignored. In this paper, we develop a novel discriminant framework, which allows to integrate the dynamic mutual dependence of potential event participants into the discrimination process. Specifically, we formulate the group-oriented event participation problem as a variant two-stage discriminant framework to capture the users’ preferences as well as their latent social connections. The experimental results on real-world data show that our method can effectively predict the event participation with a significant margin compared with several state-of-the-art baselines, which validates the hypothesis that dynamic mutual influence could play an important role in the decisionmaking process of social event participation.