Exploring Weather Data to Predict Activity Attendance in Event-based Social Network

Abstract

Event-based social networks (EBSNs) connect online and offline lives. They allow online users with similar interests to get together in real life. Attendance prediction for activities in EBSNs has attracted a lot of attention and several factors have been studied. However, the prediction accuracy is not very good for some special activities, such as outdoor activities. Moreover, a very important factor, the weather, has not been well exploited. In this work, we strive to understand how the weather factor impacts activity attendance, and we explore it to improve attendance prediction from the organizer’s view. First, we classify activities into two categories: the outdoor and the indoor activities. We study the different ways that weather factors may impact these two kinds of activities. We also introduce a new factor of event duration. By integrating the above factors with user interest and user-event distance, we build a model of attendance prediction with the weather named GBT-W , based on the Gradient Boosting Tree. Furthermore, we develop a platform to help event organizers estimate the possible number of activity attendance with different settings (e.g., different weather, location) to effectively plan their events. We conduct extensive experiments, and the results show that our method has a better prediction performance on both the outdoor and the indoor activities, which validates the reasonability of considering weather and duration.