Uncovering the Heterogeneous Effects of Preference Diversity on User Activeness: A Dynamic Mixture Model

Preference diversity arouses much research attention in recent years, as it is believed to be closely related to many profound problems such as user activeness in social media or recommendation systems. However, due to the lack of large-scale data with comprehensive user behavior log and accurate content labels, the real quantitative effect of preference diversity on user activeness is still largely unknown. This paper studies the heterogeneous effect of preference diversity on user activeness in social media. We examine large-scale real-world datasets collected from two of the most popular video-sharing social platforms in China, including the behavior logs of more than 787 thousand users and 1.95 million videos, with accurate content category information. We investigate the distribution and evolution of preference diversity, and find rich heterogeneity in the effect of preference diversity on the dynamic activeness. Furthermore, we discover the divergence of preference diversity mechanisms for the same user under different usage scenarios, such as active (where users actively seek information) and passive (where users passively receive information) modes. Unlike existing qualitative studies, we propose a universal mixture model with the capability of accurately fitting dynamic activeness curves while reflecting the heterogeneous patterns of preference diversity. To our best knowledge, this is the first quantitative model that incorporates the effect of preference diversity on user activeness. With the modeling parameters, we are able to make accurate churn and activeness predictions and provide decision support for increasing user activity through the intervention of diversity. Our findings and model comprehensively reveal the significance of preference diversity and provide potential implications for the design of future recommendation systems and social media.