Scale-Adaptive Group Optimization for Social Activity Planning

Abstract

Studies have shown that each person is more inclined to enjoy a group activity when 1) she is interested in the activity, and 2) many friends with the same interest join it as well. Nevertheless, even with the interest and social tightness information available in online social networks, nowadays many social group activities still need to be coordinated manually. In this paper, therefore, we first formulate a new problem, named Participant Selection for Group Activity (PSGA), to decide the group size and select proper participants so that the sum of personal interests and social tightness of the participants in the group is maximized, while the activity cost is also carefully examined. To solve the problem, we design a new randomized algorithm, named Budget-Aware Randomized Group Selection (BARGS), to optimally allocate the computation budgets for effective selection of the group size and participants, and we prove that BARGS can acquire the solution with a guaranteed performance bound. The proposed algorithm was implemented in Facebook, and experimental results demonstrate that social groups generated by the proposed algorithm significantly outperform the baseline solutions.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 22, 2015
Accession Number
AD1015837

Entities

People

  • De-nian Yang
  • Hong-han Shuai
  • Ming-syan Chen
  • Philip S. Yu

Organizations

  • National Taiwan University

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Energy and Power Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Algorithms
  • Communities
  • Computational Complexity
  • Computations
  • Computer Science
  • Distribution Functions
  • Information Science
  • Iterations
  • Normal Distribution
  • Optimization
  • Probability
  • Random Variables
  • Social Media
  • Social Networking Services
  • Social Networks
  • Tightness
  • Urban Areas

Readers

  • Agent-Based Social Robotics and Mobile-Assisted Learning in Virtual Environments.
  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Regression Analysis.