Temporal modeling of basic human values from social network usage

Abstract

Basic human values represent what we think are important to our lives that include security, independence, success, kindness, and pleasure. Each of us holds different values with different degrees of importance. Existing studies show that values of a person can be identified from their social network usage. However, the value priority of a person may change over time due to different factors such as time, event, influence, social structure, and technology. In this research, we are the first to investigate whether the change of value priorities can be identified from social network usage. We propose a weighted hybrid time-series-based model to capture the change of values of a social network user. We conducted an experimental study with 726 Facebook users and showed that our model accurately captures the value priority changes from the social network usage and achieves significantly higher accuracy than our baseline hidden Markov model-based technique. We also validated the change of a user's value priorities in real life using a questionnaire-based technique.