Utility-Aware Social Event-Participant Planning

Online event-based social network (EBSN) platforms are becoming popular these days. An important task of managing EBSNs is to arrange proper social events to interested users. Existing approaches usually assume that each user only attends one event or ignore location information. The overall utility of such strategy is limited in real world: 1) each user may attend multiple events; 2) attending multiple events will incur spatio-temporal conflicts and travel expenses. Thus, a more intelligent EBSN platform that provides personalized event planning for each participant is desired. In this paper, we first formally define the problem of Utility-aware Social Event-participant Planning (USEP), which is proven to be NP-hard. To solve the USEP problem, we first devise a greedy-based heuristic algorithm, which performs fast under certain circumstances but has no approximation guarantee. We then present a two-step approximation framework, which not only guarantees a 1/2-approximation ratio but also includes a series of optimization techniques to improve its space/time efficiency. Finally, we verify the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed methods through extensive experiments on real and synthetic datasets.