College of Business

Social commerce and location-based services provide a data platform for coexisting and competing businesses in geographical neighborhoods. Our research is aimed at mining data from such platforms to gain valuable insights for better support to strategic and operational business decisions. We develop a computational framework for predicting business performance that takes into account both intrinsic (e.g., attributes) and extrinsic (e.g., competitions) factors. Our experiments on synthetic and real datasets demonstrated superiority of a hybrid prediction model that adopts both link-based and context-based assumptions.