Stochastics and Statistics
Behavior-aware user response modeling in social media: Learning from diverse heterogeneous data

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2014.09.008Get rights and content

Highlights

  • A hierarchical ensemble learning framework is proposed for behavior-aware user response modeling using diverse heterogeneous data.

  • A data transformation and feature extraction strategy is developed to transform the large-scale and multi-relational data into customer-centered high-order tensors.

  • An improved H-MK-SVM is developed to integrate the external, tag and keyword, individual behavioral and engagement behavioral data for feature selection from multiple correlated attributes and ensemble learning.

Abstract

With the rapid development of Web 2.0 applications, social media have increasingly become a major factor influencing the purchase decisions of customers. Longitudinal individual and engagement behavioral data generated on social media sites post challenges to integrate diverse heterogeneous data to improve prediction performance in customer response modeling. In this study, a hierarchical ensemble learning framework is proposed for behavior-aware user response modeling using diverse heterogeneous data. In the framework, a general-purpose data transformation and feature extraction strategy is developed to transform the heterogeneous high-dimensional multi-relational datasets into customer-centered high-order tensors and to extract attributes. An improved hierarchical multiple kernel support vector machine (H-MK-SVM) is developed to integrate the external, tag and keyword, individual behavioral and engagement behavioral data for feature selection from multiple correlated attributes and for ensemble learning in user response modeling. The subagging strategy is adopted to deal with large-scale imbalanced datasets. Computational experiments using a real-world microblog database were conducted to investigate the benefits of integrating diverse heterogeneous data. Computational results show that the improved H-MK-SVM using longitudinal individual behavioral data exhibits superior performance over some commonly used methods using aggregated behavioral data and the improved H-MK-SVM using engagement behavioral data performs better than using only the external and individual behavioral data.

Introduction

Mass marketing and direct marketing are two commonly used approaches for product (service) advertising and promotional activities (Bose & Chen, 2009). For direct marketing, a marketing message is delivered to target customers without an intermediary person or indirect media involved (Bose & Chen, 2009). Customer response modeling aims at identifying the target customers who will respond to a specific marketing campaign from the existing customer base (Cui, Wong and Zhang, 2010, Kang, Cho and MacLachlan, 2012). With more and more companies adopting direct marketing, customer response modeling has become one of the most effective direct marketing strategies to increase total revenue and decrease marketing cost (Cui, Wong and Lui, 2006, Kang, Cho and MacLachlan, 2012, Lee et al., 2010). Because the purpose is to identify customers as possible respondents and non-respondents to a specific marketing campaign (Bose and Chen, 2009, Lee et al., 2010), customer response modeling is a binary classification problem.

For customer response modeling, external and behavioral data are usually used (Bose & Chen, 2009). Customer demographic, geographic and lifestyle data are often obtained from external data vendors (Baecke & Van den Poel, 2011), and thus are called external data. Customer behavioral data including transaction records, feedbacks to marketers, customer reviews and Web browsing records are considered to be the most important data in customer response modeling (Bose & Chen, 2009). Many supervised and semi-supervised machine learning techniques have been proposed for the customer response modeling problem (Lessmann & Voß, 2008). These techniques include artificial neural networks (ANN) (Crone, Lessmann and Stahlbock, 2006, Kim et al., 2005), decision trees (Crone et al., 2006), Bayesian networks (Baesens et al., 2002, Cui, Wong and Lui, 2006), logistic regression (Kang et al., 2012), bagging (Ha, Cho, & MacLachlan, 2005), support vector machines (SVM) (Crone, Lessmann and Stahlbock, 2006, Kang, Cho and MacLachlan, 2012, Lessmann and Voß, 2009) and transductive SVMs (Lee et al., 2010). Moreover, some other techniques including clustering (Kang et al., 2012), sampling (Crone, Lessmann and Stahlbock, 2006, Kang, Cho and MacLachlan, 2012), sequential pattern discovery (Chen, Hsu, & Hsu, 2011), feature selection (Cui et al., 2010) and other preprocessing methods (Crone et al., 2006) have been combined with classification techniques to refine the customer base and improve prediction performance.

In the age of Web 2.0, social media sites develop rapidly. Social media refers to a group of online applications allowing the creation and exchange of user-generated contents (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2010). The most popular types of social media include wikis, blogs, microblogs, social networks, video and photo sharing and online communities. They become popular communication tools due in part to the open access of the Internet, the popularity of mobile devices, the availability of the tools and the fast social interactions among users. Social media have increasingly become a major factor influencing the opinions, attitudes and the purchase behavior of customers (Mangold & Faulds, 2009).

User behavioral data generated and collected on social media sites include two categories, i.e., individual behavioral data and engagement behavioral data. Moreover, according to the ways of using the behavioral data in the customer response models, user behavioral data can be classified as longitudinal behavioral data and aggregated behavioral data. Fig. 1illustrates the different types of behavioral data. For traditional customer response modeling, the longitudinal individual behavioral variables derived from the transactional databases are usually transformed into the aggregated variables such as recency, frequency and monetary (RFM) variables which have been included in most direct marketing datasets and adopted in most response models (Baesens et al., 2002, Crone, Lessmann and Stahlbock, 2006, Cui, Wong and Zhang, 2010).

In comparison with individual behavior, customer engagement behavior, as an emerging concept, focuses on the customers’ behavioral manifestation beyond purchase such as electronic word-of-mouth, customer–customer interaction, recommendations, blogging and online reviews (van Doorn et al., 2010). In social media, customer engagement behavior has great effect on the individual purchase decisions (Cheung and Thadani, 2012, Dellarocas, 2003, van Doorn et al., 2010). For example, Dell gained high income by posting offers to its followers on Twitter (Li & Li, 2013). A survey showed that 91 percent of respondents said that they consulted online reviews before purchasing, and 46 percent of respondents believed that the online reviews influenced their purchase decisions (Cheung & Thadani, 2012). Therefore, incorporating engagement behavioral data into customer analytical models is increasingly recognized as a new direction of customer relationship management and direct marketing (Bijmolt et al., 2010).

The aggregated individual behavioral attributes are usually used as predictors in most customer response models. Few existing studies of customer response modeling pay attention to the longitudinal individual and engagement behavioral data which are widely available in the social media databases. In recent years, the analysis of engagement behavior has been used widely in the areas of recommendation and customer churn prediction. Some researchers combined the extended factorization model with other methods such as additive forest, logistic regression and scorecard model to predict the top-N items the customer was most likely to follow using the aggregated customer–customer interaction data (Chen et al., 2012, Chen et al., 2012, Zhao, 2012). The information of individual customers and a group of customers which have similar characteristics was used in a novel customer profile model for product recommendation (Park & Chang, 2009). For customer relationship management of the telecommunication industry, the customer–customer interaction data have been recognized as important complements to traditional behavioral data. The aggregated engagement behavioral attributes were combined with traditional attributes to predict customer churn (Zhang, Zhu, Xu, & Wan, 2012).

Some researchers recognized that customer purchase behavior varies over time and the use of the longitudinal individual behavioral data can improve prediction performance (Chen, Fan and Sun, 2012, Liu, Lai and Lee, 2009). Sequential pattern analysis was combined with collaborative filtering for temporal purchase behavioral data to improve recommendation performance (Cho, Cho and Kim, 2005, Choi et al., 2012, Huang and Huang, 2009, Liu, Lai and Lee, 2009, Min and Han, 2005). Prinzie and Van den Poel (2006, Prinzie and Van den Poel, 2007, Prinzie and Van den Poel, 2011) incorporated customer purchase sequence into dynamic Bayesian networks and Markov models to predict the next product for a customer to buy. Ballings and Van den Poel (2012) studied the problem of how long the customer historical data should be for customer churn prediction. They suggested that selecting a good length of historical data can decrease computational burden.

For social media, the term Item may represent a specific user, organization, product (service) or event. Examples of events include the appearance of a new term or keyword, the announcement of a new product (service) or activity, or a new price of an existing product (service). The rich behavioral data generated on social media sites can be used for managers to predict user responses to an Item, make marketing policies and allocate marketing resources to influence customer behavior (Power & Phillips-Wren, 2011). For social media, customer response modeling is also called user response modeling, and the two terms are used interchangeably. In this study, customer response modeling taking into consideration of user behavioral, e.g., longitudinal individual and engagement behavioral, data is called behavior-aware user response modeling. However, the large, diverse and heterogeneous data generated on social media sites bring great challenges on behavior-aware user response modeling (Bijmolt et al., 2010, Cao, Ou and Yu, 2012, Chau and Xu, 2012).

How to deal with diverse heterogeneous data is a challenge. A variety of methods can be used for customer response modeling using external and aggregated individual behavioral data. However, to the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt of combining the individual behavioral and the engagement behavioral data, as well as the longitudinal and the external data for user response modeling in social media.

How to deal with large amount of data is another challenge. Social media sites produce large amount of user data. For example, the daily volume of posts mentioning some well-known brands or products such as Google, Microsoft, Sony, iPhone and iPad in Twitter is in the millions (Li & Li, 2013). It is necessary to use marketing intelligence methods to automatically analyze the massive amount of data. The analysis of the massive amount of data requires efficient preprocessing of the data and excellent scalability of the customer response models.

In this study, a hierarchical ensemble learning framework is developed for behavior-aware user response modeling in social media. In the framework, a general-purpose data preprocessing strategy is proposed to transform the large-scale and multi-relational user datasets derived from social media sites into high-order tensors and to extract attributes as input of the models. An improved hierarchical multiple kernel SVM (H-MK-SVM), as an extension of the SVM and the multiple kernel SVM (MK-SVM), is developed to model diverse heterogeneous data including external, tag and keyword, individual behavioral and engagement behavioral data. Because of the multi-relations of the individual behavioral and engagement behavioral data, one advantage of the improved H-MK-SVM is its ability in adaptively selecting associated attributes. Another advantage of this method is its ability in integrating the diverse heterogeneous social media data into a unified ensemble classifier to improve the prediction performance. Furthermore, the subagging strategy (Paleologo, Elisseeff, & Antonini, 2010) is adopted to deal with large imbalanced datasets and ensemble methods are used to combine the results of subagging.

This paper is organized as follows. The next section presents the hierarchical ensemble learning framework for behavior-aware user response modeling in social media. Section 3 describes the database used in the study and presents the data preprocessing strategy. The model formulation of the improved H-MK-SVM is presented in Section 4. The computational results are reported in Section 5. Conclusions and directions for future research are given in Section 6.

Section snippets

The hierarchical ensemble learning framework

In this section, diverse heterogeneous data used for user response modeling in social media are discussed. A hierarchical ensemble learning framework is then proposed for user response modeling in social media using the diverse heterogeneous data.

The data

In this section, the database used for the computational experiments is introduced first. The data transformation and feature extraction strategies for heterogeneous high-dimensional and multi-relational datasets are then described in detail using this database. The subagging strategy is then discussed.

The model

An improved H-MK-SVM, based on the work of Chen, Fan, et al. (2012), is developed in the hierarchical ensemble learning framework. The H-MK-SVM is an extension of the SVM and the MK-SVM. The SVM is one of the most popular and effective machine learning techniques and usually has excellent classification performance in practical applications (Vapnik, 1998). The MK-SVM, as an important extension of the SVM, can integrate heterogeneous data and adaptively select the best combinations of multiple

Computational experiments

Computational resultsare reported in this section. Matlab 7.4 was used to conduct the computational experiments. The desktop computer used for the computation has an Intel Core i7 processor with a 3.40 gigahertz clock speed and has 16 gigabytes of RAM. Eight competitive methods including the SVM, feed-forward ANN (FFANN), radial basis function neural network (RBFNN), decision tree (DT), random forest (RF), Adaboost and the two ensemble methods, i.e., MV and AV, were also used in the experiments

Conclusions

In this study, a hierarchical ensemble learning framework is developed for behavior-aware user response modeling in social media using diverse heterogeneous data. In the framework, a general-purpose data transformation and feature extraction strategy is proposed and an improved H-MK-SVM is developed. In comparison with the work of Chen, Fan, et al. (2012) on customer churn prediction, the major contributions of this study are (1) for the original data from social media, a data transformation

Acknowledgments

The authors greatly appreciate the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. This work was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Project Nos. 71101023, 71471035 and 71271051) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities, NEU, China (Project No. N120406001).

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