Tracking and Forecasting Dynamics in Crowdfunding: A Basis-Synthesis Approach

Crowdfunding is an emerging online fundraising mechanism for creators to launch campaigns (projects) to solicit funds or expand their influence. Tracking the dynamics, i.e., daily funding amounts can be of great help to campaign creators as well as contributors. Previous works on this subject either fit the fluctuations of time-series with predefined stochastic process or apply a regularization term to constrain learned tendencies, resulting in limited generalization abilities. Patterns of funding-amount sequences in crowdfunding are often exclusive and non-linear, making previous predictors suboptimal. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel method based on synthesized bases which can be composed into arbitrary patterns. Concretely, we build a large set of candidate basis from which we select based on reliability, diversity and latent structures. We use representations of sequences in this basis space as a predictor, and adopt a dual-graph to exploit neighbouring information to enhance its prediction quality. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.