Skip to main content

Modeling User Return Time Using Inhomogeneous Poisson Process

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 11438))

Abstract

For Intelligent Assistants (IA), user activity is often used as a lag metric for user satisfaction or engagement. Conversely, predictive leading metrics for engagement can be helpful with decision making and evaluating changes in satisfaction caused by new features. In this paper, we propose User Return Time (URT), a fine grain metric for gauging user engagement. To compute URT, we model continuous inter-arrival times between users’ use of service via a log Gaussian Cox process (LGCP), a form of inhomogeneous Poisson process which captures the irregular variations in user usage rate and personal preferences typical of an IA. We show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches on predicting the return time of users on real-world data collected from an IA. Experimental results demonstrate that our model is able to predict user return times reasonably well and considerably better than strong baselines that make the prediction based on past utterance frequency.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

References

  1. Chakraborty, S., Radlinski, F., Shokouhi, M., Baecke, P.: On correlation of absence time and search effectiveness. In: Proceedings of the International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Doerr, C., Blenn, N., Van Mieghem, P.: Lognormal infection times of online information spread. PloS One 8, e64349 (2013)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Du, N., Wang, Y., He, N., Sun, J., Song, L.: Time-sensitive recommendation from recurrent user activities. In: Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Halfaker, A., et al.: User session identification based on strong regularities in inter-activity time. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  5. He, D., Göker, A.: Detecting session boundaries from web user logs. In: Proceedings of the BCS-IRSG 22nd Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Hosseini, S.A., et al.: Recurrent Poisson factorization for temporal recommendation. In: Proceedings of the 23rd ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Lee, S., Wilson, J.R., Crawford, M.M.: Modeling and simulation of a nonhomogeneous Poisson process having cyclic behavior. Commun. Stat.-Simul. Comput. 20, 777–809 (1991)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Møller, J., Syversveen, A.R., Waagepetersen, R.P.: Log Gaussian cox processes. Scandinavian J. Stat. 25, 451–482 (1998)

    Article  MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  9. Ogata, Y.: On Lewis’ simulation method for point processes. IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 27, 23–31 (1981)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Rasmussen, C.E.: Gaussian processes in machine learning. In: Bousquet, O., von Luxburg, U., Rätsch, G. (eds.) ML -2003. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 3176, pp. 63–71. Springer, Heidelberg (2004). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-28650-9_4

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Ross, S.M.: Introduction to probability models (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Takeshi Sakaki, M.O., Matsuo, Y.: Earthquake shakes Twitter users: real-time event detection by social sensors (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Yang, C., Shi, X., Jie, L., Han, J.: I know you’ll be back: interpretable new user clustering and churn prediction on a mobile social application. In: Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery & Data Mining (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Yang, S.H., Zha, H.: Mixture of mutually exciting processes for viral diffusion. In: International Conference on Machine Learning (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Zhang, R., Walder, C., Rizoiu, M.A., Xie, L.: Efficient non-parametric Bayesian Hawkes processes. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on World Wide Web (2018)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Mohammad Akbari .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Akbari, M., Cetoli, A., Bragaglia, S., O’Harney, A.D., Sloan, M., Wang, J. (2019). Modeling User Return Time Using Inhomogeneous Poisson Process. In: Azzopardi, L., Stein, B., Fuhr, N., Mayr, P., Hauff, C., Hiemstra, D. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11438. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15719-7_5

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15719-7_5

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-15718-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-15719-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics