Lifestyle Modeling and Visualization

Catherine Havasi, Ryan MacDowell, Rob Speer, and

Marko Popovic

Why Model Lifestyles?

• Over time, a person’s and a community’s spending habits change.

• Understanding this change is useful– For a person– For the bank– For area businesses

What could be a lifestyle?

• What you do – Travel, go to coffee shops and bakeries

• Classes of purchases– Clothing and shoes, power tools and gas grills

• Franchises you frequent– Starbucks and The Gap, Walmart and Burger King

• Whatever you want to look at!

What does this do?• Analyze and

visualize the space of area businesses and derive “lifestyle gradients”

• Show how people move through this space over time

Open Mind Common Sense

• Unspoken assumptions we use in reasoning

• Collecting common sense from the internet

• 750,000 assertions, 15,000 users• Lots of different types of knowledge

– “A dog is a mammal”– “The last thing you do when you cook is

clean up the kitchen.”

AnalogySpace

• Technique for learning, reasoning, and analyzing using common sense

• AnalogySpace can:– generalize from sparsely-collected knowledge– confirm or question existing knowledge– classify information in a knowledge base in a

variety of ways

• Can use the same technique to group other things: businesses, people, communities

How does it do it?

• Make a Business Space– From business data– From customer’s spending patters– From customer’s reviews on the internet

• Discover (or set) lifestyle gradients• Given a person’s statement show

how they move through this space over time

Demos!

How we put this together

• We create an space using information about what companies sell and common sense.

• Take a person’s statement use that to place them in the space.

• Move them through the space as their spending habits change over time.– x and y coordinates, RGB color values,

size…

Where we go from here

• We can create a space using people’s spending patterns.

• We can take into account reviews and pricing information from online sources.– Shopping blogs, Yelp, company websites

• Extend to communities - find how groups of people spend money in a given area.

Common Sense Computing

• CSCI Homepage:– http://csc.media.mit.edu/

• AnalogySpace– http://analogyspace.media.mit.edu/

• Open Mind Common Sense– http://commons.media.mit.edu/

I can be reached at: havasi@media.mit.edu