Product Purchase Prediction Based on Time Series Data Analysis in Social Media

Social Network Services (SNS) have been recently commonly used for collecting and inferring user-related information. As SNS users leave multiple traces of their activities and thoughts, it has become possible to predict their future actions, e.g., a trip to a far-away destination or a purchase of a certain product. In this paper, we approach the latter problem and attempt to predict purchasing actions of Twitter users. In particular, we focus on the task of purchase prediction of two product categories: digital cameras and personal computers. The results suggest the feasibility of prediction when using relatively simple features collected from user tweeting histories as well as from their social contexts.