Little Is Much: Bridging Cross-Platform Behaviors through Overlapped Crowds

Abstract

People often use multiple platforms to fulfill their different information needs. With the ultimate goal of serving people intelligently, a fundamental way is to get comprehensive understanding about user needs. How to organically integrate and bridge cross-platform information in a human-centric way is important. Existing transfer learning assumes either fully-overlapped or non-overlapped among the users. However, the real case is the users of different platforms are partially overlapped. The number of overlapped users is often small and the explicitly known overlapped users is even less due to the lacking of unified ID for a user across different platforms. In this paper, we propose a novel semi-supervised transfer learning method to address the problem of cross-platform behavior prediction, called XPTrans. To alleviate the sparsity issue, it fully exploits the small number of overlapped crowds to optimally bridge a user's behaviors in different platforms. Extensive experiments across two real social networks show that XPTrans significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art. We demonstrate that by fully exploiting 26% overlapped users, XPTrans can predict the behaviors of non-overlapped users with the same accuracy as overlapped users, which means the small overlapped crowds can successfully bridge the information across different platforms.