PersonalitySensing: A Multi-View Multi-Task Learning Approach for Personality Detection based on Smartphone Usage

Songcheng Gao, Wenzhong Li, Lynda J. Song, Xiao Zhang, Mingkai Lin, Sanglu Lu

Abstract: Assessing individual's personality traits has important implications in psychology, sociology, and economics. Conventional personality measurement methods were questionnaire-based, which are time-consuming and manpower-expensive. With the pervasive deployment of mobile communication applications, smartphone usage data was found to relate to people's social behavioral and psychological aspects. In this paper, we propose a deep learning approach to infer people's Big Five personality traits based on smartphone data. Specifically, we collect smartphone usage snapshots with an Android App, and extract features from the collected data. We propose a multi-view multi-task learning approach with a deep neural network model to fuse the extracted features and learn the Big Five personality traits jointly. Extensive experiments based on the real-world smartphone data collected from university volunteers show that the proposed approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in personality prediction.