Retweeting: An act of viral users, susceptible users, or viral topics?

• Main Authors: HOANG, Tuan-Anh, LIM, Ee Peng
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2013
• Subjects: Databases and Information Systems; Numerical Analysis and Scientific Computing; Social Media
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/1965; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/2964/viewcontent/0.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

When a user retweets, there are three behavioral factors that cause the actions. They are the topic virality, user virality and user susceptibility. Topic virality captures the degree to which a topic attracts retweets by users. For each topic, user virality and susceptibility refer to the likelihood that a user attracts retweets and performs retweeting respectively. To model a set of observed retweet data as a result of these three topic specific factors, we first represent the retweets as a three-dimensional tensor of the tweet authors, their followers, and the tweets themselves. We then propose the V 2S model, a tensor factorization model, to simultaneously derive the three sets of behavioral factors. Our experiments on a real Twitter data set show that the V 2S model can effectively mine the behavioral factors of users and tweet topics during an election event. We also demonstrate that the V 2S model outperforms the other topic based models in retweet prediction.