Distribution-Adapted Model for Helpful Vote Prediction

The number of helpful votes on a review is an essential indicator of how much impact the review has on other customers in electronic commerce. Therefore, predicting the number of helpful votes is an important task. Regression analysis and Tobit modeling are typical methods of prediction. Those methods come from the same initial assumption that the number of helpful votes follows a normal distribution on any dataset. However, the assumption is not usually confirmed, and the distribution of the helpful votes often follows other distributions. This paper proposes a framework for investigating the feasibility of building a model that predicts the number of helpful votes according to the distribution of the number of helpful votes. On top of that, considering the review age, we propose an adaptive window size sampling method to evaluate the model on review datasets sorted chronologically. The experimental results validated that the model adapting to the best approximate distribution gives a significant improvement compared to the baseline models. In addition, model evaluation using the adaptive window size sampling method has significant impacts on the performance on large datasets.