DB Seminar [Spring 2015]: Konstantinos Pelechrinis (UPitt)

Abstract:
The proliferation of mobile handheld devices in combination with the technological advancements in mobile computing has led to a number of innovative services that make use of the location information available on such devices. Traditional yellow pages websites have now moved to mobile platforms, giving the opportunity to local businesses and potential, near-by, customers to connect. These platforms can offer an affordable advertisement channel to local businesses. One of the mechanisms offered by location-based social networks (LBSNs) allows businesses to provide special offers to their customers that connect through the platform. We collect a large time-series dataset from approximately 14 million venues of a major online social network and analyze the performance of such campaigns using randomization techniques and (non-parametric) hypothesis testing with statistical bootstrapping. Our main finding indicates that promotions through LBSNs do not alter the probability of observing an increase in the daily check-ins to a venue, while the underlying standardized effect size changes only slightly. Finally, we design classifiers by extracting three different types of features that are able to provide an educated decision on whether a special offer campaign for a local business will succeed or not both in short and long term.