Temporal dynamics of user activities: deep learning strategies and mathematical modeling for long-term and short-term profiling

Abstract Profiling social media users is an analytical approach to generate an extensive blueprint of user’s personal characteristics, which can be useful for a diverse range of applications, such as targeted marketing and personalized recommendations. Although social user profiling has gained substantial attention in recent years, effectively constructing a collaborative model that could describe long and short-term profiles is still challenging. In this paper, we will discuss the profiling problem from two perspectives; how to mathematically model and track user’s behavior over short and long periods and how to enhance the classification of user’s activities. Using mathematical equations, our model can define periods in which the user's interests abruptly changed. A dataset consisting of 30,000 tweets was built and manually annotated into 10 topic categories. Bi-LSTM and GRU models are applied to classify the user’s activities representing his interests, which then are utilized to create and model the dynamic profile. In addition, the effect of word embedding techniques and pre-trained classification models on the accuracy of the classification process is explored in this research.