A user segmentation method in heterogeneous open innovation communities based on multilayer information fusion and attention mechanisms

The heterogeneity and diversity of users and external knowledge resources is a hallmark of open innovation communities (OICs). Although user segmentation in heterogeneous OICs is a prominent and recurring issue, it has received limited attention in open innovation research and practice. Most existing user segmentation methods ignore the heterogeneity and embedded relationships that link users to communities through various items, resulting in limited accuracy of user segmentation. In this study, we propose a user segmentation method in heterogeneous OICs based on multilayer information fusion and attention mechanisms. Our method stratifies the OIC and creates user node embeddings based on different relationship types. Node embeddings from different layers are then merged to form a global representation of user fusion embeddings based on a semantic attention mechanism. The embedding learning of nodes is optimized using a multi-objective optimized node representation based on the Deep Graph Infomax (DGI) algorithm. Finally, the k-means algorithm is used to form clusters of users and partition them into distinct segments based on shared features. Experiments conducted on datasets collected from four OICs of business intelligence and analytics software show that our method outperforms multiple baseline methods based on unsupervised and supervised graph embeddings. This study provides methodological guidance for user segmentation based on structured community data and semantic social relations and provides insights for its practice in heterogeneous OICs.