Reducing Cumulative Errors of Incremental CP Decomposition in Dynamic Online Social Networks

CANDECOMP/PARAFAC (CP) decomposition is widely used in various online social network (OSN) applications. However, it is inefficient when dealing with massive and incremental data. Some incremental CP decomposition (ICP) methods have been proposed to improve the efficiency and process evolving data, by updating decomposition results according to the newly added data. The ICP methods are efficient, but inaccurate because of serious error accumulation caused by approximation in the incremental updating. To promote the wide use of ICP, we strive to reduce its cumulative errors while keeping high efficiency. We first differentiate all possible errors in ICP into two types: the cumulative reconstruction error and the prediction error. Next, we formulate two optimization problems for reducing the two errors. Then, we propose several restarting strategies to address the two problems. Finally, we test the effectiveness in three typical dynamic OSN applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work on reducing the cumulative errors of the ICP methods in dynamic OSNs.