Predicting Information Diffusion in Social Networks using Content and User's Profiles

International audiencePredicting the diffusion of information on social networks is a key problem for applications like Opinion Leader Detection, Buzz Detection or Viral Marketing. Many recent diffusion models are direct extensions of the Cascade and Threshold models, initially proposed for epidemiology and social studies. In such models, the diffusion process is based on the dynamics of interactions between neighbor nodes in the network (the social pressure), and largely ignores important dimensions as the content of the piece of information diffused. We propose here a new family of probabilistic models that aims at predicting how a con- tent diffuses in a network by making use of additional dimensions: the content of the piece of information diffused, user's profile and willing- ness to diffuse. These models are illustrated and compared with other approaches on two blog datasets. The experimental results obtained on these datasets show that taking into account the content of the piece of information diffused is important to accurately model the diffusion process

Who Will Retweet This? Automatically Identifying and Engaging Strangers on Twitter to Spread Information

There has been much effort on studying how social media sites, such as Twitter, help propagate information in different situations, including spreading alerts and SOS messages in an emergency. However, existing work has not addressed how to actively identify and engage the right strangers at the right time on social media to help effectively propagate intended information within a desired time frame. To address this problem, we have developed two models: (i) a feature-based model that leverages peoples' exhibited social behavior, including the content of their tweets and social interactions, to characterize their willingness and readiness to propagate information on Twitter via the act of retweeting; and (ii) a wait-time model based on a user's previous retweeting wait times to predict her next retweeting time when asked. Based on these two models, we build a recommender system that predicts the likelihood of a stranger to retweet information when asked, within a specific time window, and recommends the top-N qualified strangers to engage with. Our experiments, including live studies in the real world, demonstrate the effectiveness of our work

Alter ego, state of the art on user profiling: an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding User Profiling.

This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and\ud behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the\ud most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation’s as\ud well as a user’s perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives\ud and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for\ud the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and\ud suggestions for further research are given

Long-term Product Rating Prediction Based on Users' Short-term Multiple Ratings

Ratings and product reviews could be considered as one of the main features determining the quality of a product in online store systems, especially in deciding whether to place a product as part of an online store's inventory. online vendors are often attracted by product reviews and ratings. However, when the average product rating observed based on a small number of user ratings, the decision maker may not be certain about choosing that product, even if it has a fairly high rate. Long-term rating predictions would help online vendors to identify products and advertise their websites by choosing potential ones. In this paper machine learning approach utilizing linear regression model is used to predict long-term product rate. The model evaluated using the Datasheet of the Amazon Online Store website,1996 to 2014. Keywords: Rating, Long-term Prediction, Machine Learning Algorithm, Linear Regression. DOI: 10.7176/JIEA/9-4-04 Publication date:June 30th 2019

Employing Topological Data Analysis On Social Networks Data To Improve Information Diffusion

For the past decade, the number of users on social networks has grown tremendously from thousands in 2004 to billions by the end of 2015. On social networks, users create and propagate billions of pieces of information every day. The data can be in many forms (such as text, images, or videos). Due to the massive usage of social networks and availability of data, the field of social network analysis and mining has attracted many researchers from academia and industry to analyze social network data and explore various research opportunities (including information diffusion and influence measurement). Information diffusion is defined as the way that information is spread on social networks; this can occur due to social influence. Influence is the ability affect others without direct commands. Influence on social networks can be observed through social interactions between users (such as retweet on Twitter, like on Instagram, or favorite on Flickr). In order to improve information diffusion, we measure the influence of users on social networks to predict influential users. The ability to predict the popularity of posts can improve information diffusion as well; posts become popular when they diffuse on social networks. However, measuring influence and predicting posts popularity can be challenging due to unstructured, big, noisy data. Therefore, social network mining and analysis techniques are essential for extracting meaningful information about influential users and popular posts. For measuring the influence of users, we proposed a novel influence measurement that integrates both users’ structural locations and characteristics on social networks, which then can be used to predict influential users on social networks. centrality analysis techniques are adapted to identify the users’ structural locations. Centrality is used to identify the most important nodes within a graph; social networks can be represented as graphs (where nodes represent users and edges represent interactions between users), and centrality analysis can be adopted. The second part of the work focuses on predicting the popularity of images on social networks over time. The effect of social context, image content and early popularity on image popularity using machine learning algorithms are analyzed. A new approach for image content is developed to represent the semantics of an image using its captions, called keyword vector. This approach is based on Word2vec (an unsupervised two-layer neural network that generates distributed numerical vectors to represent words in the vector space to detect similarity) and k-means (a popular clustering algorithm). However, machine learning algorithms do not address issues arising from the nature of social network data, noise and high dimensionality in data. Therefore, topological data analysis is adopted. It is a noble approach to extract meaningful information from high-dimensional data and is robust to noise. It is based on topology, which aims to study the geometric shape of data. In this thesis, we explore the feasibility of topological data analysis for mining social network data by addressing the problem of image popularity. The proposed techniques are employed to datasets crawled from real-world social networks to examine the performance of each approach. The results for predicting the influential users outperforms existing measurements in terms of correlation. As for predicting the popularity of images on social networks, the results indicate that the proposed features provides a promising opportunity and exceeds the related work in terms of accuracy. Further exploration of these research topics can be used for a variety of real-world applications (including improving viral marketing, public awareness, political standings and charity work)