Scalable Privacy-Compliant Virality Prediction on Twitter

The digital town hall of Twitter becomes a preferred medium of communication for individuals and organizations across the globe. Some of them reach audiences of millions, while others struggle to get noticed. Given the impact of social media, the question remains more relevant than ever: how to model the dynamics of attention in Twitter. Researchers around the world turn to machine learning to predict the most influential tweets and authors, navigating the volume, velocity, and variety of social big data, with many compromises. In this paper, we revisit content popularity prediction on Twitter. We argue that strict alignment of data acquisition, storage and analysis algorithms is necessary to avoid the common trade-offs between scalability, accuracy and privacy compliance. We propose a new framework for the rapid acquisition of large-scale datasets, high accuracy supervisory signal and multilanguage sentiment prediction while respecting every privacy request applicable. We then apply a novel gradient boosting framework to achieve state-of-the-art results in virality ranking, already before including tweet's visual or propagation features. Our Gradient Boosted Regression Tree is the first to offer explainable, strong ranking performance on benchmark datasets. Since the analysis focused on features available early, the model is immediately applicable to incoming tweets in 18 languages.Comment: AffCon@AAAI-19 Best Paper Award; Presented at AAAI-19 W1: Affective Content Analysi

CASPR: Customer Activity Sequence-based Prediction and Representation

Tasks critical to enterprise profitability, such as customer churn prediction, fraudulent account detection or customer lifetime value estimation, are often tackled by models trained on features engineered from customer data in tabular format. Application-specific feature engineering adds development, operationalization and maintenance costs over time. Recent advances in representation learning present an opportunity to simplify and generalize feature engineering across applications. When applying these advancements to tabular data researchers deal with data heterogeneity, variations in customer engagement history or the sheer volume of enterprise datasets. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to encode tabular data containing customer transactions, purchase history and other interactions into a generic representation of a customer's association with the business. We then evaluate these embeddings as features to train multiple models spanning a variety of applications. CASPR, Customer Activity Sequence-based Prediction and Representation, applies Transformer architecture to encode activity sequences to improve model performance and avoid bespoke feature engineering across applications. Our experiments at scale validate CASPR for both small and large enterprise applications.Comment: Presented at the Table Representation Learning Workshop, NeurIPS 2022, New Orleans. Authors listed in random orde

On the Limits to Multi-Modal Popularity Prediction on Instagram -- A New Robust, Efficient and Explainable Baseline

Our global population contributes visual content on platforms like Instagram, attempting to express themselves and engage their audiences, at an unprecedented and increasing rate. In this paper, we revisit the popularity prediction on Instagram. We present a robust, efficient, and explainable baseline for population-based popularity prediction, achieving strong ranking performance. We employ the latest methods in computer vision to maximize the information extracted from the visual modality. We use transfer learning to extract visual semantics such as concepts, scenes, and objects, allowing a new level of scrutiny in an extensive, explainable ablation study. We inform feature selection towards a robust and scalable model, but also illustrate feature interactions, offering new directions for further inquiry in computational social science. Our strongest models inform a lower limit to population-based predictability of popularity on Instagram. The models are immediately applicable to social media monitoring and influencer identification.Comment: Presented at ICAART 202