Context-Aware Prediction of User Engagement on Online Social Platforms

The success of online social platforms hinges on their ability to predict and understand user behavior at scale. Here, we present data suggesting that context-aware modeling approaches may offer a holistic yet lightweight and potentially privacy-preserving representation of user engagement on online social platforms. Leveraging deep LSTM neural networks to analyze more than 100 million Snapchat sessions from almost 80.000 users, we demonstrate that patterns of active and passive use are predictable from past behavior (R2=0.345) and that the integration of context information substantially improves predictive performance compared to the behavioral baseline model (R2=0.522). Features related to smartphone connectivity status, location, temporal context, and weather were found to capture non-redundant variance in user engagement relative to features derived from histories of in-app behaviors. Further, we show that a large proportion of variance can be accounted for with minimal behavioral histories if momentary context information is considered (R2=0.44). These results indicate the potential of context-aware approaches for making models more efficient and privacy-preserving by reducing the need for long data histories. Finally, we employ model explainability techniques to glean preliminary insights into the underlying behavioral mechanisms. Our findings are consistent with the notion of context-contingent, habit-driven patterns of active and passive use, underscoring the value of contextualized representations of user behavior for predicting user engagement on social platforms.

Generalizable Error Modeling for Search Relevance Data Annotation Tasks

Human data annotation is critical in shaping the quality of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) systems. One significant challenge in this context is posed by annotation errors, as their effects can degrade the performance of ML models. This paper presents a predictive error model trained to detect potential errors in search relevance annotation tasks for three industry-scale ML applications (music streaming, video streaming, and mobile apps) and assesses its potential to enhance the quality and efficiency of the data annotation process. Drawing on real-world data from an extensive search relevance annotation program, we illustrate that errors can be predicted with moderate model performance (AUC=0.65-0.75) and that model performance generalizes well across applications (i.e., a global, task-agnostic model performs on par with task-specific models). We present model explainability analyses to identify which types of features are the main drivers of predictive performance. Additionally, we demonstrate the usefulness of the model in the context of auditing, where prioritizing tasks with high predicted error probabilities considerably increases the amount of corrected annotation errors (e.g., 40% efficiency gains for the music streaming application). These results underscore that automated error detection models can yield considerable improvements in the efficiency and quality of data annotation processes. Thus, our findings reveal critical insights into effective error management in the data annotation process, thereby contributing to the broader field of human-in-the-loop ML.

Model Share AI: An Integrated Toolkit for Collaborative Machine Learning Model Development, Provenance Tracking, and Deployment in Python

Machine learning (ML) has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of research areas and industries, but many ML projects never progress past the proof-of-concept stage. To address this issue, we introduce Model Share AI (AIMS), an easy-to-use MLOps platform designed to streamline collaborative model development, model provenance tracking, and model deployment, as well as a host of other functions aiming to maximize the real-world impact of ML research. AIMS features collaborative project spaces and a standardized model evaluation process that ranks model submissions based on their performance on unseen evaluation data, enabling collaborative model development and crowd-sourcing. Model performance and various model metadata are automatically captured to facilitate provenance tracking and allow users to learn from and build on previous submissions. Additionally, AIMS allows users to deploy ML models built in Scikit-Learn, TensorFlow Keras, PyTorch, and ONNX into live REST APIs and automatically generated web apps with minimal code. The ability to deploy models with minimal effort and to make them accessible to non-technical end-users through web apps has the potential to make ML research more applicable to real-world challenges.

Large Language Models Can Infer Psychological Dispositions of Social Media Users

As Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate increasingly human-like abilities in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks that are bound to become integral to personalized technologies, understanding their capabilities and inherent biases is crucial. Our study investigates the potential of LLMs like ChatGPT to infer psychological dispositions of individuals from their digital footprints. Specifically, we assess the ability of GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 to derive the Big Five personality traits from users' Facebook status updates in a zero-shot learning scenario. Our results show an average correlation of r = .29 (range = [.22, .33]) between LLM-inferred and self-reported trait scores. Furthermore, our findings suggest biases in personality inferences with regard to gender and age: inferred scores demonstrated smaller errors for women and younger individuals on several traits, suggesting a potential systematic bias stemming from the underlying training data or differences in online self-expression.