Data-Driven Engineering of Social Dynamics: Pattern Matching and Profit Maximization

Huan-Kai Peng, Hao-Chih Lee, Jia-Yu Pan and Radu Marculescu

PLOS ONE, 2016, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: In this paper, we define a new problem related to social media, namely, the data-driven engineering of social dynamics. More precisely, given a set of observations from the past, we aim at finding the best short-term intervention that can lead to predefined long-term outcomes. Toward this end, we propose a general formulation that covers two useful engineering tasks as special cases, namely, pattern matching and profit maximization. By incorporating a deep learning model, we derive a solution using convex relaxation and quadratic-programming transformation. Moreover, we propose a data-driven evaluation method in place of the expensive field experiments. Using a Twitter dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our dynamics engineering approach for both pattern matching and profit maximization, and study the multifaceted interplay among several important factors of dynamics engineering, such as solution validity, pattern-matching accuracy, and intervention cost. Finally, the method we propose is general enough to work with multi-dimensional time series, so it can potentially be used in many other applications.

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0146490 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 46490&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0146490

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0146490

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().