PNP: Fast Path Ensemble Method for Movie Design

PNP: Fast Path Ensemble Method for Movie Design

Danai Koutra (University of Michigan)
Abhilash Dighe (University of Michigan)
Smriti Bhagat (Facebook)
Udi Weinsberg (Facebook)
Stratis Ioannidis (Northeastern University)
Christos Faloutsos (Carnegie Mellon University)
Jean Bolot (Technicolor)

How can we design a product or movie that will attract, for example, the interest of Pennsylvania adolescents or liberal newspaper critics? What should be the genre of that movie and who should be in the cast? In this work, we seek to identify how we can design new movies with features tailored to a specific user population. We formulate the movie design as an optimization problem over the inference of user-feature scores and selection of the features that maximize the number of attracted users. Our approach, PNP, is based on a heterogeneous, tripartite graph of users, movies and features (e.g., actors, directors, genres), where users rate movies and features contribute to movies. We learn the preferences by lever- aging user similarities defined through different types of relations, and show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, including matrix factorization and other heterogeneous graph-based analysis. We evaluate PNP on publicly available real-world data and show that it is highly scalable and effectively provides movie designs oriented towards different groups of users, including men, women, and adolescents.