Person-Centered Predictions of Psychological Constructs with Social Media Contextualized by Multimodal Sensing

Personalized predictions have shown promises in various disciplines but they are fundamentally constrained in their ability to generalize across individuals. These models are often trained on limited datasets which do not represent the fluidity of human functioning. In contrast, generalized models capture normative behaviors between individuals but lack precision in predicting individual outcomes. This paper aims to balance the tradeoff between one-for-each and one-for-all models by clustering individuals on mutable behaviors and conducting cluster-specific predictions of psychological constructs in a multimodal sensing dataset of 754 individuals. Specifically, we situate our modeling on social media that has exhibited capability in inferring psychosocial attributes. We hypothesize that complementing social media data with offline sensor data can help to personalize and improve predictions. We cluster individuals on physical behaviors captured via Bluetooth, wearables, and smartphone sensors. We build contextualized models predicting psychological constructs trained on each cluster’s social media data and compare their performance against generalized models trained on all individuals’ data. The comparison reveals no difference in predicting affect and a decline in predicting cognitive ability, but an improvement in predicting personality, anxiety, and sleep quality. We construe that our approach improves predicting psychological constructs sharing theoretical associations with physical behavior. We also find how social media language associates with offline behavioral contextualization. Our work bears implications in understanding the nuanced strengths and weaknesses of personalized predictions, and how the effectiveness may vary by multiple factors. This work reveals the importance of taking a critical stance on evaluating the effectiveness before investing efforts in personalization.