Does Personalization Help? Predicting How Social Situations Affect Personal Values

Personal values represent what people find important in their lives, and are key drivers of human behavior. For this reason, support agents should provide help that is aligned with the personal values of the users. To do this, the support agent not only should know the value preferences of the user, but also how different situations in the user's life affect these personal values. We represent situations using their psychological characteristics, and we build predictive models that given the psychological characteristics of a situation, predict whether the situation promotes, demotes or does not affect a personal value. In this work, we focus on predictions for the value ‘enjoyment of life', and use different machine learning classifiers, all of them performing better than chance when training on data from multiple people. The best predictive model is a multi-layer perceptron classifier, which achieves an accuracy of 72%. Further, we hypothesize that the accuracy of such models would drop when tested on individual data sets. The data supports our hypothesis, and the accuracy of the best performing model drops by at least 11% when tested on individual data. To tackle this, we propose an active learning procedure to build personalized prediction models having the user in the loop. Results show that this approach outperforms the previously built model while using only 30% of the training data. Our findings suggest that how situations affect personal values can have subjective interpretations, but we can account for those subjective interpretations by involving the user when building a prediction model.