Platform-Oriented Event Time Allocation(Extended Abstract)

Online Event-based social networks (EBSNs), such as Meetup and Whova, which provide platforms for users to publish, arrange and participate in events, have become increasingly popular. A major challenge for managing EBSNs is to generate the most satisfactory event arrangement. Existing approaches usually focus on assigning a set of events organized to time intervals, but ignore the competitive relationships among different event organizers, which will lead to event time allocations unacceptable to organizers. Thus, a more intelligent EBSNs platform that allocates social events properly in a global view (i.e. the perspective of platform) is desired. In this work, we first formally define the problem of Platform-oriented Event Time Allocation (PETA), which contains two parts: the prediction of event feasible time period and the event time allocation. We propose a method to calculate event feasible time period based on event time prediction, and design a greedy algorithm and two approximation algorithms to solve the PETA problem. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets demonstrate that the proposed algorithms have high effectiveness and efficiency.