  In this paper, we mine and learn to predict how similar a pair of users'
interests towards videos are, based on demographic (age, gender and location)
and social (friendship, interaction and group membership) information of these
users. We use the video access patterns of active users as ground truth (a form
of benchmark). We adopt tag-based user profiling to establish this ground
truth, and justify why it is used instead of video-based methods, or many
latent topic models such as LDA and Collaborative Filtering approaches. We then
show the effectiveness of the different demographic and social features, and
their combinations and derivatives, in predicting user interest similarity,
based on different machine-learning methods for combining multiple features. We
propose a hybrid tree-encoded linear model for combining the features, and show
that it out-performs other linear and treebased models. Our methods can be used
to predict user interest similarity when the ground-truth is not available,
e.g. for new users, or inactive users whose interests may have changed from old
access data, and is useful for video recommendation. Our study is based on a
rich dataset from Tencent, a popular service provider of social networks, video
services, and various other services in China.
