Predicting Pinterest: Automating a distributed human computation

Abstract

Everyday, millions of users save content items for future use on sites like Pinterest, by “pinning” them onto carefully categorised personal pinboards, thereby creating personal taxonomies of the Web. This paper seeks to understand Pinterest as a distributed hu man computation that categorises images from around the Web. We show that despite being categorised onto personal pinboards by individual actions, there is a generally a global agreement in implicitly assigning images into a coarse-grained global taxonomy of 32 categories, and furthermore, users tend to specialise in a handful of categories. By exploiting these characteristics, and augmenting with image-related features drawn from a state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural network, we develop a cascade of predictors that together automate a large fraction of Pinterest actions. Our end-to- end model is able to both predict whether a user will repin an image onto her own pinboard, and also which pinboard she might choose, with an accuracy of 0.69 (Accuracy@5 of 0.75).

Publication
Proceedings of the 24th international conference on World wide web
Changtao Zhong
Changtao Zhong
Former PhD student (now Data Scientist at Twitter)
Dmytro Karamshuk
Dmytro Karamshuk
Former Postdoc, now Research Scientist at Facebook Core Data Science.
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