Modeling and predicting behavioral dynamics on the web

TLDR

User behavior on the Web changes over time, with queries and underlying informational goals varying. The study aims to model and predict temporal changes in user behavior on the Web. The authors build a physics‑ and signal‑processing‑based temporal framework that smooths and trends user behavior, learns models from historical features, and dynamically selects the best prediction model. Experiments show the framework significantly outperforms baseline models, improving query suggestions, crawling policies, and result ranking.

Abstract

User behavior on the Web changes over time. For example, the queries that people issue to search engines, and the underlying informational goals behind the queries vary over time. In this paper, we examine how to model and predict this temporal user behavior. We develop a temporal modeling framework adapted from physics and signal processing that can be used to predict time-varying user behavior using smoothing and trends. We also explore other dynamics of Web behaviors, such as the detection of periodicities and surprises. We develop a learning procedure that can be used to construct models of users' activities based on features of current and historical behaviors. The results of experiments indicate that by using our framework to predict user behavior, we can achieve significant improvements in prediction compared to baseline models that weight historical evidence the same for all queries. We also develop a novel learning algorithm that explicitly learns when to apply a given prediction model among a set of such models. Our improved temporal modeling of user behavior can be used to enhance query suggestions, crawling policies, and result ranking.