Matt Richardson’s research while affiliated with University of Washington and other places

One of the major applications of data mining is in helping companies determine which potential customers to market to. If the expected profit from a customer is greater than the cost of marketing to her, the marketing action for that customer is executed. So far, work in this area has considered only the intrinsic value of the customer (i.e, the expected profit from sales to her). We propose to model also the customer's network value: the expected profit from sales to other customers she may influence to buy, the customers those may influence, and so on recursively. Instead of viewing a market as a set of independent entities, we view it as a social network and model it as a Markov random field. We show the advantages of this approach using a social network mined from a collaborative filtering database. Marketing that exploits the network value of customers -- also known as viral marketing -- can be extremely effective, but is still a black art. Our work can be viewed as a step towards providing a more solid foundation for it, taking advantage of the availability of large relevant databases.

The PageRank algorithm, used in the Google search engine, greatly improves the results of Web search by taking into account the link structure of the Web. PageRank assigns to a page a score proportional to the number of times a random surfer would visit that page, if it surfed indefinitely from page to page, following all outlinks from a page with equal probability. We propose to improve PageRank by using a more intelligent surfer, one that is guided by a probabilistic model of the relevance of a page to a query. Efficient execution of our algorithm at query time is made possible by precomputing at crawl time (and thus once for all queries) the necessary terms. Experiments on two large subsets of the Web indicate that our algorithm significantly outperforms PageRank in the (human -rated) quality of the pages returned, while remaining efficient enough to be used in today's large search engines. 1