Modelling cascades over time in microblogs

One of the most important features of microblogging services such as Twitter is how easy it is to re-share a piece of information across the network through various user connections, forming what we call a "cascade". Business applications such as viral marketing have driven a tremendous am...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: WEI, Xie, ZHU, Feida, LIU, Siyuan, WANG, Ke
Format: text
Language:English
Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3135
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4135/viewcontent/144___Modelling_Cascades_Over_Time_in_Microblogs__BigDataCongress2015_.pdf
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Institution: Singapore Management University
Language: English
id sg-smu-ink.sis_research-4135
record_format dspace
spelling sg-smu-ink.sis_research-41352017-03-23T07:37:15Z Modelling cascades over time in microblogs WEI, Xie ZHU, Feida LIU, Siyuan WANG, Ke One of the most important features of microblogging services such as Twitter is how easy it is to re-share a piece of information across the network through various user connections, forming what we call a "cascade". Business applications such as viral marketing have driven a tremendous amount of research effort predicting whether a certain cascade will go viral. Yet the rarity of viral cascades in real data poses a challenge to all existing prediction methods. One solution is to simulate cascades that well fit the real viral ones, which requires our ability to tell how a certain cascade grows over time. In this paper, we build a general time-aware cascade model for each particular cascade, in which the chance of one user's re-sharing behaviour over time is modelled as a hazard function of time. Based on two key observations on user retweeting behaviour, we design an appropriate hazard function specifically for Twitter network. We evaluate our model on a large real Twitter dataset with over two million retweeting cascades. Our experiment results show our proposed model outperforms other baseline models in terms of model fitting. Further, we make use of our model to simulate viral cascades, which are otherwise few and far in-between, to alleviate the imbalance issue in cascade data, offering a 20% boost in viral cascade discovery. 2015-11-01T07:00:00Z text application/pdf https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3135 info:doi/10.1109/BigData.2015.7363812 https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4135/viewcontent/144___Modelling_Cascades_Over_Time_in_Microblogs__BigDataCongress2015_.pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems eng Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University Twitter network Baseline models Business applications Cascade data Cascades modelling Hazard function Microblogging services Model fitting Resharing behaviour Retweeting cascades Time-aware cascade model Viral cascade discovery Viral cascades Viral marketing Databases and Information Systems
institution Singapore Management University
building SMU Libraries
continent Asia
country Singapore
Singapore
content_provider SMU Libraries
collection InK@SMU
language English
topic Twitter network
Baseline models
Business applications
Cascade data
Cascades modelling
Hazard function
Microblogging services
Model fitting
Resharing behaviour
Retweeting cascades
Time-aware cascade model
Viral cascade discovery
Viral cascades
Viral marketing
Databases and Information Systems
spellingShingle Twitter network
Baseline models
Business applications
Cascade data
Cascades modelling
Hazard function
Microblogging services
Model fitting
Resharing behaviour
Retweeting cascades
Time-aware cascade model
Viral cascade discovery
Viral cascades
Viral marketing
Databases and Information Systems
WEI, Xie
ZHU, Feida
LIU, Siyuan
WANG, Ke
Modelling cascades over time in microblogs
description One of the most important features of microblogging services such as Twitter is how easy it is to re-share a piece of information across the network through various user connections, forming what we call a "cascade". Business applications such as viral marketing have driven a tremendous amount of research effort predicting whether a certain cascade will go viral. Yet the rarity of viral cascades in real data poses a challenge to all existing prediction methods. One solution is to simulate cascades that well fit the real viral ones, which requires our ability to tell how a certain cascade grows over time. In this paper, we build a general time-aware cascade model for each particular cascade, in which the chance of one user's re-sharing behaviour over time is modelled as a hazard function of time. Based on two key observations on user retweeting behaviour, we design an appropriate hazard function specifically for Twitter network. We evaluate our model on a large real Twitter dataset with over two million retweeting cascades. Our experiment results show our proposed model outperforms other baseline models in terms of model fitting. Further, we make use of our model to simulate viral cascades, which are otherwise few and far in-between, to alleviate the imbalance issue in cascade data, offering a 20% boost in viral cascade discovery.
format text
author WEI, Xie
ZHU, Feida
LIU, Siyuan
WANG, Ke
author_facet WEI, Xie
ZHU, Feida
LIU, Siyuan
WANG, Ke
author_sort WEI, Xie
title Modelling cascades over time in microblogs
title_short Modelling cascades over time in microblogs
title_full Modelling cascades over time in microblogs
title_fullStr Modelling cascades over time in microblogs
title_full_unstemmed Modelling cascades over time in microblogs
title_sort modelling cascades over time in microblogs
publisher Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University
publishDate 2015
url https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3135
https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/sis_research/article/4135/viewcontent/144___Modelling_Cascades_Over_Time_in_Microblogs__BigDataCongress2015_.pdf
_version_ 1770572823046127616