Twitter has recently become one of the most popular online social networking websites where users can share news and ideas through messages in the form of tweets. As a tweet gets retweeted from user to user, large cascades of information diffusion are formed over the global network. Existing works on cascades have mainly focused on predicting their popularity in terms of size. In this paper, we leverage on the temporal pattern of retweets to model the diffusion dynamics of a cascade. Notably, retweet cascades provide two complementary information: (a) inter-retweet time intervals of retweets, and (b) diffusion of cascade over the underlying follower network. Using datasets from Twitter, we identify two types of cascades based on presence or absence of early peaks in their sequence of inter-retweet intervals. We identify multiple diffusion localities associated with a cascade as it propagates over the network. Our studies reveal the transition of a cascade to a new locality facilitated by pivotal users that are highly cascade dependent following saturation of current locality. We propose an analytical model to show co-occurrence of first peaks with cascade migration to a new locality as well as predict locality saturation from interretweet intervals. Finally, we validate these claims from empirical data showing co-occurrence of first peaks and migration with good accuracy; we obtain even better accuracy for successfully classifying saturated and non-saturated diffusion localities from inter-retweet intervals.
Identification of influential users in online social networks allows to facilitate efficient information diffusion to a large part of the network, thus benefiting diverse applications including viral marketing, disease control and news dissemination. Existing methods have mainly relied on the network structure only for the detection of influential users. In this paper, we enrich this approach by proposing a fast, efficient and unsupervised algorithm SmartInf to detect a set of influential users by identifying anchor nodes from temporal sequence of retweets in Twitter cascades. Such anchor nodes provide important signatures of tweet diffusion across multiple diffusion localities and hence act as precursors for detection of influential nodes 1. The set of influential nodes identified by SmartInf have the capacity to expose the tweet to a large and diverse population, when targeted as seeds thereby maximizing the influence spread. Experimental evaluation on empirical datasets from Twitter show the superiority of SmartInf over state-of-the-art baselines in terms of infecting larger population; further, our evaluation shows that SmartInf is scalable to large-scale networks and is robust to missing data. Finally, we investigate the key factors behind the improved performance of SmartInf by testing our algorithm on a synthetic network using synthetic cascades simulated on this network. Our results reveal the effectiveness of SmartInf in identifying a diverse set of influential users that facilitate faster diffusion of tweets to a larger population.
Event-based social networking platforms such as Meetup have recently witnessed a huge growth. However, with the rise in the volume of groups and events, making individual events attractive has become increasingly challenging for its organizers. As a result, we find that events hosted by groups of same category at similar venues and similar times, also widely differ in their popularity. Data study reveals that the topics specified in textual descriptions of events may be key to their popularity. In this paper, we introduce a novel concept of topical micro-categories in the context of EBSNs for accurately characterizing events, such that events belonging to the same micro-category exhibit similar popularity profile. We develop a principled method to detect such micro-categories from the textual descriptions of individual events. Our experiments reveal the significance of the detected micro-categories in determining the popularity of associated Meetup events and groups. We also investigate the effectiveness of the micro-categories in a real-world application scenario by developing a recommendation model; this model recommends relevant micro-categories to a group for hosting its future events with enhanced popularity. Notably, our model achieves an average NDCG score of around 0.75 showing a straight 5% improvement over the best performing competing method.
Network embedding, that aims to learn low-dimensional vector representation of nodes such that the network structure is preserved, has gained significant research attention in recent years. However, most state-of-the-art network embedding methods are computationally expensive and hence unsuitable for representing nodes in billion-scale networks. In this paper, we present LouvainNE, a hierarchical clustering approach to network embedding. Precisely, we employ Louvain, an extremely fast and accurate community detection method, to build a hierarchy of successively smaller subgraphs. We obtain representations of individual nodes in the original graph at different levels of the hierarchy, then we aggregate these representations to learn the final embedding vectors. Our theoretical analysis shows that our proposed algorithm has quasi-linear runtime and memory complexity. Our extensive experimental evaluation, carried out on multiple real-world networks of different scales, demonstrates both (i) the scalability of our proposed approach that can handle graphs containing tens of billions of edges, as well as (ii) its effectiveness in performing downstream network mining tasks such as network reconstruction and node classification. CCS CONCEPTS• Computing methodologies → Machine learning algorithms; • Mathematics of computing → Graph algorithms.
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