8,662 research outputs found
Forecasting Popularity of Videos using Social Media
This paper presents a systematic online prediction method (Social-Forecast)
that is capable to accurately forecast the popularity of videos promoted by
social media. Social-Forecast explicitly considers the dynamically changing and
evolving propagation patterns of videos in social media when making popularity
forecasts, thereby being situation and context aware. Social-Forecast aims to
maximize the forecast reward, which is defined as a tradeoff between the
popularity prediction accuracy and the timeliness with which a prediction is
issued. The forecasting is performed online and requires no training phase or a
priori knowledge. We analytically bound the prediction performance loss of
Social-Forecast as compared to that obtained by an omniscient oracle and prove
that the bound is sublinear in the number of video arrivals, thereby
guaranteeing its short-term performance as well as its asymptotic convergence
to the optimal performance. In addition, we conduct extensive experiments using
real-world data traces collected from the videos shared in RenRen, one of the
largest online social networks in China. These experiments show that our
proposed method outperforms existing view-based approaches for popularity
prediction (which are not context-aware) by more than 30% in terms of
prediction rewards
Analysis and Forecasting of Trending Topics in Online Media Streams
Among the vast information available on the web, social media streams capture
what people currently pay attention to and how they feel about certain topics.
Awareness of such trending topics plays a crucial role in multimedia systems
such as trend aware recommendation and automatic vocabulary selection for video
concept detection systems.
Correctly utilizing trending topics requires a better understanding of their
various characteristics in different social media streams. To this end, we
present the first comprehensive study across three major online and social
media streams, Twitter, Google, and Wikipedia, covering thousands of trending
topics during an observation period of an entire year. Our results indicate
that depending on one's requirements one does not necessarily have to turn to
Twitter for information about current events and that some media streams
strongly emphasize content of specific categories. As our second key
contribution, we further present a novel approach for the challenging task of
forecasting the life cycle of trending topics in the very moment they emerge.
Our fully automated approach is based on a nearest neighbor forecasting
technique exploiting our assumption that semantically similar topics exhibit
similar behavior.
We demonstrate on a large-scale dataset of Wikipedia page view statistics
that forecasts by the proposed approach are about 9-48k views closer to the
actual viewing statistics compared to baseline methods and achieve a mean
average percentage error of 45-19% for time periods of up to 14 days.Comment: ACM Multimedia 201
Emergence of Equilibria from Individual Strategies in Online Content Diffusion
Social scientists have observed that human behavior in society can often be
modeled as corresponding to a threshold type policy. A new behavior would
propagate by a procedure in which an individual adopts the new behavior if the
fraction of his neighbors or friends having adopted the new behavior exceeds
some threshold. In this paper we study the question of whether the emergence of
threshold policies may be modeled as a result of some rational process which
would describe the behavior of non-cooperative rational members of some social
network. We focus on situations in which individuals take the decision whether
to access or not some content, based on the number of views that the content
has. Our analysis aims at understanding not only the behavior of individuals,
but also the way in which information about the quality of a given content can
be deduced from view counts when only part of the viewers that access the
content are informed about its quality. In this paper we present a game
formulation for the behavior of individuals using a meanfield model: the number
of individuals is approximated by a continuum of atomless players and for which
the Wardrop equilibrium is the solution concept. We derive conditions on the
problem's parameters that result indeed in the emergence of threshold
equilibria policies. But we also identify some parameters in which other
structures are obtained for the equilibrium behavior of individuals
Temporal Locality in Today's Content Caching: Why it Matters and How to Model it
The dimensioning of caching systems represents a difficult task in the design
of infrastructures for content distribution in the current Internet. This paper
addresses the problem of defining a realistic arrival process for the content
requests generated by users, due its critical importance for both analytical
and simulative evaluations of the performance of caching systems. First, with
the aid of YouTube traces collected inside operational residential networks, we
identify the characteristics of real traffic that need to be considered or can
be safely neglected in order to accurately predict the performance of a cache.
Second, we propose a new parsimonious traffic model, named the Shot Noise Model
(SNM), that enables users to natively capture the dynamics of content
popularity, whilst still being sufficiently simple to be employed effectively
for both analytical and scalable simulative studies of caching systems.
Finally, our results show that the SNM presents a much better solution to
account for the temporal locality observed in real traffic compared to existing
approaches.Comment: 7 pages, 7 figures, Accepted for publication in ACM Computer
Communication Revie
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