What is user profile?

According to Wiki, a profile refers to the explicit digital representation of a person’s identity.

What is user profiling?

User profiling is studied and utilized in recommender system, where it helps recommender system to know users’ preference requirements and behave in accordance of them [2]. Usually user profiles are represented as vectors in a high dimensional space, with vectors denoting users’ preferences on different items, (e.g., web pages, movies, or social media posts.) or users’ preferences on various topics (e.g., keywords representing topics, or topic categories from a taxonomy [1].

How user profiling works?

A user profiling system can be subdivided into subtasks like profile extraction, profile integration and user interest discovery [2].

Ref.

[1] Zhe Zhao, Zhiyuan Cheng, Lichan Hong, Ed H Chi, and Ann Arbor. 2015. Improving User Topic Interest Profiles by Behavior Factorization. In WWW, 1406–1416.

[2] Sumitkumar Kanoje, Sheetal Girase, and Debajyoti Mukhopadhyay. 2014. User Profiling Trends, Techniques and Applications. IJAFRC 1, 11 (2014), 2348–4853.