Mining Hidden Populations through Attributed Search

Abstract

Researchers often query online social platforms through their application programming interfaces (API) to find target populations such as people with mental illness~\cite{De-Choudhury2017} and jazz musicians~\cite{heckathorn2001finding}. Entities of such target population satisfy a property that is typically identified using an oracle (human or a pre-trained classifier). When the property of the target entities is not directly queryable via the API, we refer to the property as `hidden' and the population as a hidden population. Finding individuals who belong to these populations on social networks is hard because they are non-queryable, and the sampler has to explore from a combinatorial query space within a finite budget limit. By exploiting the correlation between queryable attributes and the population of interest and by hierarchically ordering the query space, we propose a Decision tree-based Thompson sampler (\texttt{DT-TMP}) that efficiently discovers the right combination of attributes to query. Our proposed sampler outperforms the state-of-the-art samplers in online experiments, for example by 54\% on Twitter. When the number of matching entities to a query is known in offline experiments, \texttt{DT-TMP} performs exceedingly well by a factor of 0.9-1.5$\times$ over the baseline samplers. In the future, we wish to explore the option of finding hidden populations by formulating more complex queries.