Characterization of the Mobile User Profile Based on Sentiments and Network Usage Attributes

Abstract

Providing resources to meet user needs in futuristic mobile networks is still challenging since the network resources like spectrum and base stations do not increase in the same proportion as the accelerated growth of network traffic. Because of this, human/user behavior attributes can assist resource management in dealing with these challenges, which pick up aspects of how the user impacts the usage of mobile networks, such as network usage, the content of interest, urban mobility routines, social networks, and sentiment. A user profile is a combination of user/human behavior attributes. Such profiles are expected to be a knowledge for softwarization enablers to improve the management of future wireless networks fully. Nevertheless, the correlation between human sentiment and wireless and mobile network usage has not been deeply investigated in the literature about the mobile user profile. This work aims to define the user profile using a transfer learning approach for the sentiment classification of WhatsApp messages. A real-life experiment was conducted to collect users' attributes, namely the WhatsApp messages and network usage. A new data analysis methodology is proposed that consists of a frequent item-set pattern mining (FP-Growth) based on Association Rules, the Chi-squared statistical test, and descriptive statistics. This methodology assesses the correlation between sentiment and network usage in a profound way. Results show that the users participating in the experiment form three groups. The first group, with 55.6% of the users, contains users who present a strong relation between negative sentiment and low network usage and also a strong relation between positive sentiment and high network usage. The second group contains 25.9% of the users and is composed of userswho present a strong relation between positive sentiment and high network usage. The third group contains 18.5% of the users for whom the correlation between sentiment and network usage is still statistical significant, but the strength of this relation is much more weak then in the other two groups. Thus, 81.5% of the users (the first two groups) present a strong relation between user sentiment captured from WhatsApp messages and the network traffic generated by them.