Understanding and Predicting Weight Loss with Mobile Social Networking Data.

It has become increasingly popular to use mobile social networking applications for weight loss and management. Users can not only create profiles and maintain their records but also perform a variety of social activities that shatter the barrier to share or seek information. Due to the open and connected nature, these applications produce massive data that consists of rich weight-related information which offers immense opportunities for us to enable advanced research on weight loss. In this paper, we conduct the initial investigation to understand weight loss with a large-scale mobile social networking dataset with near 10 million users. In particular, we study individual and social factors related to weight loss and reveal a number of interesting findings that help us build a meaningful model to predict weight loss automatically. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed model and the significance of social factors in weight loss.