A graph-oriented model for hierarchical user interest in precision social marketing

With the rapid development of social commerce, how to push and diffuse marketing messages in online social network (OSN) more effectively has increasingly become a significant issue, which can result in benefits for enterprises, users and platforms. A fundamental solution to this issue is how to accurately and comprehensively model user interest. To resolve such a significant and challenging task, our study constructed a user interest graph represented by a hierarchical tree structure that covers a wide range of topics, from coarse-grained to fine-grained three-level interest topics, such as food, entertainment and shopping, with a total of 167 nodes. In addition, considering that a user's interests are always changing over time, an exponential interest decay scheme is employed in this study. Finally, a series of experiments are conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed model by comparing it with three benchmarks designed based on the proposed algorithm and two similar hierarchical user interest models. The experimental results demonstrate our model works well to predict user interests. This research will provide important basic technology and valuable decision support for precise and personalized social marketing practices.