Prediction of popularity has profound impact for social media, since it offers opportunities to reveal individual preference and public attention from evolutionary social systems. Previous research, although achieves promising results, neglects one distinctive characteristic of social data, i.e., sequentiality. For example, the popularity of online content is generated over time with sequential post streams of social media. To investigate the sequential prediction of popularity, we propose a novel prediction framework called Deep Temporal Context Networks (DTCN) by incorporating both temporal context and temporal attention into account. Our DTCN contains three main components, from embedding, learning to predicting. With a joint embedding network, we obtain a unified deep representation of multi-modal user-post data in a common embedding space. Then, based on the embedded data sequence over time, temporal context learning attempts to recurrently learn two adaptive temporal contexts for sequential popularity. Finally, a novel temporal attention is designed to predict new popularity (the popularity of a new user-post pair) with temporal coherence across multiple time-scales. Experiments on our released image dataset with about 600K Flickr photos demonstrate that DTCN outperforms state-of-the-art deep prediction algorithms, with an average of 21.51 relative performance improvement in the popularity prediction (Spearman Ranking Correlation).
Recently, time-aware popularity prediction receives much attention. Both academia and industry have paid more effort on this research topic. Existing works about prediction with temporal information can be concluded into two main paradigms. The first paradigm focuses on predicting the popularity growth of a published post by analyzing its temporal trend and pattern at early stage. Szabo and Huberman proposed to predict popularity based on growth pattern characteristics of online popularity at early stage @cite_10 . Yang and Leskovec found the temporal patterns reveal how the content’s popularity grows and fades during the post propagation @cite_14 . Roy proposed to grasp sudden bursts of a post popularity with cross-domain knowledge @cite_3 . Kong explored the problem of detecting which hashtag would be bursting. Most of these works provided dynamic comprehension on popularity accumulation of online content, but their prediction needs to rely on early stage popularity patterns of a published post. Our method takes one step further on popularity prediction before that the corresponding post was published.
@cite_14 @cite_10 @cite_3
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The evolution of social media popularity exhibits rich temporality, i.e., popularities change over time at various levels of temporal granularity. This is influenced by temporal variations of public attentions or user activities. For example, popularity patterns of street snap on Flickr are observed to depict distinctive fashion styles at specific time scales, such as season-based periodic fluctuations for Trench Coat or one-off peak in days for Evening Dress. However, this fact is often overlooked by existing research of popularity modeling. We present the first study to incorporate multiple time-scale dynamics into predicting online popularity. We propose a novel computational framework in the paper, named Multi-scale Temporalization, for estimating popularity based on multi-scale decomposition and structural reconstruction in a tensor space of user, post, and time by joint low-rank constraints. By considering the noise caused by context inconsistency, we design a data rearrangement step based on context aggregation as preprocessing to enhance contextual relevance of neighboring data in the tensor space. As a result, our approach can leverage multiple levels of temporal characteristics and reduce the noise of data decomposition to improve modeling effectiveness. We evaluate our approach on two large-scale Flickr image datasets with over 1.8 million photos in total, for the task of popularity prediction. The results show that our approach significantly outperforms state-of-the-art popularity prediction techniques, with a relative improvement of 10.9 -47.5 in terms of prediction accuracy. Time information plays a crucial role on social media popularity. Existing research on popularity prediction, effective though, ignores temporal information which is highly related to user-item associations and thus often results in limited success. An essential way is to consider all these factors (user, item, and time), which capture the dynamic nature of photo popularity. In this paper, we present a novel approach to factorize the popularity into user-item context and time-sensitive context for exploring the mechanism of dynamic popularity. The user-item context provides a holistic view of popularity, while the time-sensitive context captures the temporal dynamics nature of popularity. Accordingly, we develop two kinds of time-sensitive features, including user activeness variability and photo prevalence variability. To predict photo popularity, we propose a novel framework named Multi-scale Temporal Decomposition (MTD), which decomposes the popularity matrix in latent spaces based on contextual associations. Specifically, the proposed MTD models time-sensitive context on different time scales, which is beneficial to automatically learn temporal patterns. Based on the experiments conducted on a real-world dataset with 1.29M photos from Flickr, our proposed MTD can achieve the prediction accuracy of 79.8 and outperform the best three state-of-the-art methods with a relative improvement of 9.6 on average. The popularity of content in social media is unequally distributed, with some items receiving a disproportionate share of attention from users. Predicting which newly-submitted items will become popular is critically important for both the hosts of social media content and its consumers. Accurate and timely prediction would enable hosts to maximize revenue through differential pricing for access to content or ad placement. Prediction would also give consumers an important tool for filtering the content. Predicting the popularity of content in social media is challenging due to the complex interactions between content quality and how the social media site highlights its content. Moreover, most social media sites selectively present content that has been highly rated by similar users, whose similarity is indicated implicitly by their behavior or explicitly by links in a social network. While these factors make it difficult to predict popularity a priori, stochastic models of user behavior on these sites can allow predicting popularity based on early user reactions to new content. By incorporating the various mechanisms through which web sites display content, such models improve on predictions that are based on simply extrapolating from the early votes. Specifically, for one such site, the news aggregator Digg, we show how a stochastic model distinguishes the effect of the increased visibility due to the network from how interested users are in the content. We find a wide range of interest, distinguishing stories primarily of interest to users in the network (“niche interests”) from those of more general interest to the user community. This distinction is useful for predicting a story’s eventual popularity from users’ early reactions to the story. In this paper, we propose a methodology to predict the popularity of online contents. More precisely, rather than trying to infer the popularity of a content itself, we infer the likelihood that a content will be popular. Our approach is rooted in survival analysis where predicting the precise lifetime of an individual is very hard and almost impossible but predicting the likelihood of one's survival longer than a threshold or another individual is possible. We position ourselves in the standpoint of an external observer who has to infer the popularity of a content only using publicly observable metrics, such as the lifetime of a thread, the number of comments, and the number of views. Our goal is to infer these observable metrics, using a set of explanatory factors, such as the number of comments and the number of links in the first hours after the content publication, which are observable by the external observer. We use a Cox proportional hazard regression model that divides the distribution function of the observable popularity metric into two components: a) one that can be explained by the given set of explanatory factors (called risk factors) and b) a baseline distribution function that integrates all the factors not taken into account. To validate our proposed approach, we use data sets from two different online discussion forums: dpreview.com, one of the largest online discussion groups providing news and discussion forums about all kinds of digital cameras, and myspace.com, one of the representative online social networking services. On these two data sets we model two different popularity metrics, the lifetime of threads and the number of comments, and show that our approach can predict the lifetime of threads from Dpreview (Myspace) by observing a thread during the first 5 6 days (24 hours, respectively) and the number of comments of Dpreview threads by observing a thread during first 2 3 days.