Understanding Smartphone Users From Installed App Lists Using Boolean Matrix Factorization.

Smartphones are changing humans' lifestyles. Mobile applications (apps) on smartphones serve as entries for users to access a wide range of services in our daily lives. The apps installed on one's smartphone convey lots of personal information, such as demographics, interests, and needs. This provides a new lens to understand smartphone users. However, it is difficult to compactly characterize a user with his/her installed app list. In this article, a user representation framework is proposed, where we model the underlying relations between apps and users with Boolean matrix factorization (BMF). It builds a compact user subspace by discovering basic components from installed app lists. Each basic component encapsulates a semantic interpretation of a series of special-purpose apps, which is a reflection of user needs and interests. Each user is represented by a linear combination of the semantic basic components. With this user representation framework, we use supervised and unsupervised learning methods to understand users, including mining user attributes, discovering user groups, and labeling semantic tags to users. Extensive experiments were conducted on three data subsets from a large-scale real-world dataset for evaluation, each consisting of installed app lists from over 10 000 users. The results demonstrated the effectiveness of our user representation framework.