Publication Type
Conference Proceeding Article
Version
publishedVersion
Publication Date
11-2015
Abstract
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.
Keywords
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
Discipline
Databases and Information Systems
Publication
Proceedings 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data: Santa Clara, CA, 29 October - 1 November 2015
First Page
677
Last Page
686
ISBN
9781479999255
Identifier
10.1109/BigData.2015.7363812
Publisher
IEEE
City or Country
Piscataway, NJ
Citation
WEI, Xie; ZHU, Feida; LIU, Siyuan; and WANG, Ke.
Modelling cascades over time in microblogs. (2015). Proceedings 2015 IEEE International Conference on Big Data: Santa Clara, CA, 29 October - 1 November 2015. 677-686.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/sis_research/3135
Copyright Owner and License
LARC
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
http://doi.org/10.1109/BigData.2015.7363812