Predicting Micro-Level Behavior in Online Communities for Risk Management

Online communities amass vast quantities of valuable knowledge and thus generate major value to their owners. Where these communities are incorporated in a business as the main means of sharing ideas and issues regarding products produced by the business, it is important that the value of this knowledge endures and is easily recognized. For good management of such a business, risk analysis of the integrated online community is required. We choose to focus on the process of knowledge creation rather than the knowledge gained from individual messages isolated from context. Consequently, we model collections of messages, linked via tree-like structures; these message collections we call threads. Here we suggest a risk framework aimed at managing micro-level thread related risks. Specifically, we target the risk that there is no satisfactory response to the original message after a period of time. Risks are considered as binary events; the event can therefore be flagged when it is predicted to occur for the attention of the community manager. To predict such a binary response, we use several methods, including a Bayesian probit regression estimated via Gibbs sampling; results indicate this model to be suitable for classification tasks such as those considered.