Lei Tang

Behavioral targeting (BT) is a widely used technique for online advertising. It leverages information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as page views, search queries and ad clicks, to select the ads most relevant to user to display. With the proliferation of social networks, it is possible to relate the behavior of individuals and their social connections. Although the similarity among connected individuals are well established (i.e., homophily), it is still not clear… Show more

Behavioral targeting (BT) is a widely used technique for online advertising. It leverages information collected on an individual's web-browsing behavior, such as page views, search queries and ad clicks, to select the ads most relevant to user to display. With the proliferation of social networks, it is possible to relate the behavior of individuals and their social connections. Although the similarity among connected individuals are well established (i.e., homophily), it is still not clear whether and how we can leverage the activities of one's friends for behavioral targeting; whether forecasts derived from such social information are more accurate than standard behavioral targeting models. In this paper, we strive to answer these questions by evaluating the predictive power of social data across 60 consumer domains on a large online network of over 180 million users in a period of two and a half months. To our best knowledge, this is the most comprehensive study of social data in the context of behavioral targeting on such an unprecedented scale. Our analysis offers interesting insights into the value of social data for developing the next generation of targeting services. Show less

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of participatory Web and social media, bringing people together in many creative ways. Millions of users are playing, tagging, working, and socializing online, demonstrating new forms of collaboration, communication, and intelligence that were hardly imaginable just a short time ago. Social media also helps reshape business models, sway opinions and emotions, and opens up numerous possibilities to study human interaction and collective behavior in an… Show more

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of participatory Web and social media, bringing people together in many creative ways. Millions of users are playing, tagging, working, and socializing online, demonstrating new forms of collaboration, communication, and intelligence that were hardly imaginable just a short time ago. Social media also helps reshape business models, sway opinions and emotions, and opens up numerous possibilities to study human interaction and collective behavior in an unparalleled scale. This lecture, from a data mining perspective, introduces characteristics of social media, reviews representative tasks of computing with social media, and illustrates associated challenges. It introduces basic concepts, presents state-of-the-art algorithms with easy-to-understand examples, and recommends effective evaluation methods. In particular, we discuss graph-based community detection techniques and many important extensions that handle dynamic, heterogeneous networks in social media. We also demonstrate how discovered patterns of communities can be used for social media mining. The concepts, algorithms, and methods presented in this lecture can help harness the power of social media and support building socially-intelligent systems. This book is an accessible introduction to the study of \emph{community detection and mining in social media}. It is an essential reading for students, researchers, and practitioners in disciplines and applications where social media is a key source of data that piques our curiosity to understand, manage, innovate, and excel.

This book is supported by additional materials, including lecture slides, the complete set of figures, key references, some toy data sets used in the book, and the source code of representative algorithms. The readers are encouraged to visit the book website
(http://dmml.asu.edu/cdm/) for the latest information.
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The explosion of online content has made the management of such content non-trivial. Web-related tasks such as web page categorization, news filtering, query categorization, tag recommendation, etc. often involve the construction of multi-label categorization systems on a large scale. Existing multi-label classification methods either do not scale or have unsatisfactory performance. In this work, we propose MetaLabeler to automatically determine the relevant set of labels for each instance… Show more

The explosion of online content has made the management of such content non-trivial. Web-related tasks such as web page categorization, news filtering, query categorization, tag recommendation, etc. often involve the construction of multi-label categorization systems on a large scale. Existing multi-label classification methods either do not scale or have unsatisfactory performance. In this work, we propose MetaLabeler to automatically determine the relevant set of labels for each instance without intensive human involvement or expensive cross-validation. Extensive experiments conducted on benchmark data show that the MetaLabeler tends to outperform existing methods. Moreover, MetaLabeler scales to millions of multi-labeled instances and can be deployed easily. This enables us to apply the MetaLabeler to a large scale query categorization problem in Yahoo!, yielding a significant improvement in performance. Show less