Cognitive Inference of Demographic Data by User Ratings

Abstract

Cognitive inference of user demographics, such as gender and age, plays an important role in creating user profiles for adjusting marketing strategies and generating personalized recommendations because user demographic data is usually not available due to data privacy concerns. At present, users can readily express feedback regarding products or services that they have purchased. During this process, user demographics are concealed, but the data has never yet been successfully utilized to contribute to the cognitive inference of user demographics. In this paper, we investigate the inference power of user ratings data, and propose a simple yet general cognitive inference model, called rating to profile (R2P), to infer user demographics from user provided ratings. In particular, the proposed R2P model can achieve the following: 1. Correctly integrate user ratings into model training. 2.Infer multiple demographic attributes of users simultaneously, capturing the underlying relevance between different demographic attributes. 3. Train its two components, i.e. feature extractor and classifier, in an integrated manner under a supervised learning paradigm, which effectively helps to discover useful hidden patterns from highly sparse ratings data. We introduce how to incorporate user ratings data into the research field of cognitive inference of user demographic data, and detail the model development and optimization process for the proposed R2P. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world ratings datasets against various compared state-of-the-art methods, and the results from multiple aspects demonstrate that our proposed R2P model can significantly improve on the cognitive inference performance of user demographic data.