Simulating User-Level Twitter Activity with XGBoost and Probabilistic Hybrid Models

Abstract

The Volume-Audience-Match simulator, or VAM was applied to predict future activity on Twitter related to international economic affairs. VAM was applied to do timeseries forecasting to predict the: (1) number of total activities, (2) number of active old users, and (3) number of newly active users over the span of 24 hours from the start time of prediction. VAM then used these volume predictions to perform user link predictions. A user-user edge was assigned to each of the activities in the 24 future timesteps. VAM considerably outperformed a set of baseline models in both the time series and user-assignment tasks.