Predicting Personal Life Events from Streaming Social Content

Abstract

Researchers have shown that it is possible to identify reported instances of personal life events from users' social content, e.g., tweets. This is known as personal life event detection. In this paper, we take a step forward and explore the possibility of predicting users' next personal life event based solely on the their historically reported personal life events, a task which we refer to as personal life event prediction. We present a framework for modeling streaming social content for the purpose of personal life event prediction and describe how various instantiations of the framework can be developed to build a life event prediction model. In our extensive experiments, we find that (i) historical personal life events of a user have strong predictive power for determining the user's future life event; (ii) the consideration of sequence in historically reported personal life events shows inferior performance compared to models that do not consider sequence, and (iii) the number of historical life events and the length of the past time intervals that are taken into account for making life event predictions can impact prediction performance whereby more recent life events show more relevance for the prediction of future life events.