Efficient influence-based processing of market research queries

The rapid growth of social web has contributed vast amounts of user preference data. Analyzing this data and its relationships with products could have several practical applications, such as personalized advertising, market segmentation, product feature promotion etc. In this work we develop novel algorithms for efficiently processing two important classes of queries involving user preferences, i.e. potential customers identification and product positioning. With regards to the first problem, we formulate product attractiveness based on the notion of reverse skyline queries. We then present a new algorithm, termed as RSA, that significantly reduces the I/O cost, as well as the computation cost, when compared to the state-of-the-art reverse skyline algorithm, while at the same time being able to quickly report the first results. Several real-world applications require processing of a large number of queries, in order to identify the product characteristics that maximize the number of potential customers. Motivated by this problem, we also develop a batched extension of our RSA algorithm that significantly improves upon processing multiple queries individually, by grouping contiguous candidates, exploiting I/O commonalities and enabling shared processing. Our experimental study using both real and synthetic data sets demonstrates the superiority of our proposed algorithms for the studied classes of queries.