Huan Yan

Multi-site User Behavior Modeling and Its Application in Video Recommendation

As online video service continues to grow in popularity, video content providers compete hard for more eyeball engagement. Some users visit multiple video sites to enjoy videos of their interest while some visit exclusively one site. However, due to the isolation of data, mining and exploiting user behaviors in multiple video websites remain unexplored so far. In this work, we try to model user preferences in six popular video websites with user viewing records obtained from a large ISP in China. The empirical study shows that users exhibit both consistent cross-site interests as well as site-specific interests. To represent this dichotomous pattern of user preferences, we propose a generative model of Multi-site Probabilistic Factorization (MPF) to capture both the cross-site as well as site-specific preferences. Besides, we discuss the design principle of our model by analyzing the sources of the observed site-specific user preferences, namely, site peculiarity and data sparsity. Through conducting extensive recommendation validation, we show that our MPF model achieves the best results compared to several other state-of-the-art factorization models with significant improvements of F-measure by 12.96%, 8.24% and 6.88%, respectively. Our findings provide insights on the value of integrating user data from multiple sites, which stimulates collaboration between video service providers.

Profiling users by online shopping behaviors

Online shopping has been prevalent in our daily life. Profiling users and understanding their browsing behaviors are critical for enhancing shopping experience and maximizing sales revenue. In this paper, based on a one-month dataset recording 2 million users’ 67 million online shopping and browsing logs, we seek to understand how users browse and shop products, and how distinct these behaviors are. We find that there exist dedicate groups of users that prefer certain product categories corresponding to similar demands. Moreover, distinct differences of behaviors exist in categories, where repetitive and targeted browsing are two major prevalent patterns.

Cache Behavior Characterization and Validation Over Large-Scale Video Data

Recent proliferation of mobile networks and smart devices drives the rapid growth of mobile video traffic. Caching popular video content at any possible place of the network near to users could significantly increase their delivery efficiency. However, fundamental problems of how cache behaves and what is the principle for cache deployment in a mobile network under large-scale video views are still unknown, which include three closely relevant problems: 1) what is the best scale of regions to deploy cache appliances; 2) how many contents should be cached; and 3) which contents should be cached. In this paper, we synthetically study these problems by analyzing 10 million video view requests of six most popular content providers, in the city of Shanghai, China. We first aggregate videos from different providers by topics to measure user interests, and divide the city into nonoverlapping regions of different sizes to investigate the influence of scale. Then, we define metrics of view concentration, popular topic number, cache revenue, and popular topic similarity to quantitatively characterize cache behaviors and consequently answer the three problems. Our studies reveal that: 1) it is effective to deploy cache in regions of a wide range of different scales; 2) the larger scale region and the regions with more views should cache more contents; and 3) different regions, especially small scale ones, should cache different contents. Furthermore, based on trace-driven evaluation, we show that the overall cache hit ratio can increase by up to 30% when we apply above guidelines for cache deployment.

On Migratory Behavior in Video Consumption

Todays video streaming market is crowded with various content providers (CPs). For individual CPs, understanding user behavior, in particular how users migrate among different CPs, is crucial for improving users on-site experience and the CPs chance of success. In this paper, we take a data-driven approach to analyze and model user migration behavior in video streaming, i.e., users switching content provider during active sessions. Based on a large ISP dataset over two months (6 major content providers, 3.8 million users, and 315 million video requests), we study common migration patterns and reasons of migration. We find that migratory behavior is prevalent: 66% of users switch CPs with an average switching frequency of 13%. In addition, migration behaviors are highly diverse: regardless large or small CPs, they all have dedicated groups of users who like to switch to them for certain types of videos. Regarding reasons of migration, we find CP service quality rarely causes migration, while a few popular videos play a bigger role. Nearly 60% of cross-site migrations are landed to 0.14% top videos. Finally, we validate our findings by building an accurate regression model to predict user migration frequency, and discuss the implications of our results to CPs.

Spatial Popularity and Similarity of Watching Videos in a Large City

With the popularity of watching mobile videos, many works focus on the geographic features of user viewing behaviors, but few study them in the context of an entire metropolitan city. Different regions of a large city have different intensity of economy activities with respect to their different distances to the downtown, and how this will influence video popularity and similarity is still unclear. To quantitatively study the spatial popularity and similarity of watching videos in a large urban environment, we collect a dataset with two-month video view requests from the largest network provider in Shanghai, containing top six content providers, and study the spatial features of video access in regions of different scales. We find that 1) video popularity and similarity exist at different scales of city division; 2) the concentration of video popularity becomes higher as the region is closer to downtown; 3) when comparing the regions of same scale, the similarity of popular videos becomes lower as the region is farther away from the downtown. Finally, we correlate our findings with cache deployment, advertising and video recommendation to illustrate the implications.

WAN as a service for cloud via software-defined network and open APIs

The performance of wide area network (WAN) has a direct impact on user experience of cloud usage. In order to provide on-demand and performance-assured WAN connections, we design and implement a SDN-based system called Grace, which abstracts the underlying network resources into life-cycle network services to provide the predefined network performance via open APIs. With the advantages of this system, we demonstrate that WAN as a service for cloud can be achieved in event of the deployed Grace.