TY - GEN
T1 - Describing and Predicting Online Items with Reshare Cascades via Dual Mixture Self-exciting Processes
AU - Kong, Quyu
AU - Rizoiu, Marian Andrei
AU - Xie, Lexing
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 ACM.
PY - 2020/10/19
Y1 - 2020/10/19
N2 - It is well-known that online behavior is long-tailed, with most cascaded actions being short and a few being very long. A prominent drawback in generative models for online events is the inability to describe unpopular items well. This work addresses these shortcomings by proposing dual mixture self-exciting processes to jointly learn from groups of cascades. We first start from the observation that maximum likelihood estimates for content virality and influence decay are separable in a Hawkes process. Next, our proposed model, which leverages a Borel mixture model and a kernel mixture model, jointly models the unfolding of a heterogeneous set of cascades. When applied to cascades of the same online items, the model directly characterizes their spread dynamics and supplies interpretable quantities, such as content virality and content influence decay, as well as methods for predicting the final content popularities. On two retweet cascade datasets - - one relating to YouTube videos and the second relating to controversial news articles - - we show that our models capture the differences between online items at the granularity of items, publishers and categories. In particular, we are able to distinguish between far-right, conspiracy, controversial and reputable online news articles based on how they diffuse through social media, achieving an F1 score of 0.945. On holdout datasets, we show that the dual mixture model provides, for reshare diffusion cascades especially unpopular ones, better generalization performance and, for online items, accurate item popularity predictions.
AB - It is well-known that online behavior is long-tailed, with most cascaded actions being short and a few being very long. A prominent drawback in generative models for online events is the inability to describe unpopular items well. This work addresses these shortcomings by proposing dual mixture self-exciting processes to jointly learn from groups of cascades. We first start from the observation that maximum likelihood estimates for content virality and influence decay are separable in a Hawkes process. Next, our proposed model, which leverages a Borel mixture model and a kernel mixture model, jointly models the unfolding of a heterogeneous set of cascades. When applied to cascades of the same online items, the model directly characterizes their spread dynamics and supplies interpretable quantities, such as content virality and content influence decay, as well as methods for predicting the final content popularities. On two retweet cascade datasets - - one relating to YouTube videos and the second relating to controversial news articles - - we show that our models capture the differences between online items at the granularity of items, publishers and categories. In particular, we are able to distinguish between far-right, conspiracy, controversial and reputable online news articles based on how they diffuse through social media, achieving an F1 score of 0.945. On holdout datasets, we show that the dual mixture model provides, for reshare diffusion cascades especially unpopular ones, better generalization performance and, for online items, accurate item popularity predictions.
KW - Hawkes processes
KW - dual mixture processes
KW - online information diffusion
KW - reshare cascades
KW - self-exciting processes
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85095864009&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/3340531.3411861
DO - 10.1145/3340531.3411861
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, Proceedings
SP - 645
EP - 654
BT - CIKM 2020 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
T2 - 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2020
Y2 - 19 October 2020 through 23 October 2020
ER -