Success Prediction on Crowdfunding with Multimodal Deep Learning

Success Prediction on Crowdfunding with Multimodal Deep Learning

Chaoran Cheng, Fei Tan, Xiurui Hou, Zhi Wei

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 2158-2164. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/299

We consider the problem of project success prediction on crowdfunding platforms. Despite the information in a project profile can be of different modalities such as text, images, and metadata, most existing prediction approaches leverage only the text dominated modality. Nowadays rich visual images have been utilized in more and more project profiles for attracting backers, little work has been conducted to evaluate their effects towards success prediction. Moreover, meta information has been exploited in many existing approaches for improving prediction accuracy. However, such meta information is usually limited to the dynamics after projects are posted, e.g., funding dynamics such as comments and updates. Such a requirement of using after-posting information makes both project creators and platforms not able to predict the outcome in a timely manner. In this work, we designed and evaluated advanced neural network schemes that combine information from different modalities to study the influence of sophisticated interactions among textual, visual, and metadata on project success prediction. To make pre-posting prediction possible, our approach requires only information collected  from the pre-posting profile. Our extensive experimental results show that the image features could improve success prediction performance significantly, particularly for project profiles with little text information. Furthermore, we identified contributing elements.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Classification
Machine Learning: Data Mining
Machine Learning: Deep Learning
Machine Learning Applications: Other Applications
Computer Vision: Language and Vision