User group analytics: hypothesis generation and exploratory analysis of user data

Abstract

User data is becoming increasingly available in multiple domains ranging from the social Web to retail store receipts. User data is described by user demographics (e.g. age, gender, occupation) and user actions (e.g. rating a movie, publishing a paper, following a medical treatment). The analysis of user data is appealing to scientists who work on population studies, online marketing, recommendations, and large scale data analysis. User data analysis usually relies on identifying group-level behaviour such as “Asian women who publish regularly in databases.” Group analytics addresses peculiarities of user data such as noise and sparsity to enable insights. In this paper, we introduce a framework for user group analytics by developing several components which cover the life cycle of user groups. We provide two different analytical environments to support ‘hypothesis generation” and “exploratory analysis” on user groups. Experiments on data sets with different characteristics show the usability and efficiency of our group analytics framework.