How To Exploit Relationships To Improve Predictions

The popularity of social networks and social media has increased the amount of information available about usersu0027 behavior online--including current activities, and interactions with followers, friends, and family. This rich relational information can be used to improve predictions even when individual data is sparse, since the characteristics of friends are often correlated. Although this type of network data offer several opportunities to improve predictions about users, the characteristics of online social network data also present a number of challenges to accurately incorporate the network information into machine learning systems. This talk will outline some of the algorithmic and statistical challenges that arise due to partially-observed, large-scale networks, and describe methods for semi-supervised learning, latent-variable modeling, and active sampling to address the challenges.