Incremental Group-Level Popularity Prediction in Online Social Networks

Predicting the popularity of web contents in online social networks is essential for many applications. However, existing works are usually under non-incremental settings. In other words, they have to rebuild models from scratch when new data occurs, which are inefficient in big data environments. It leads to an urgent need for incremental prediction, which can update previous results with new data and conduct prediction incrementally. Moreover, the promising direction of group-level popularity prediction has not been well treated, which explores fine-grained information while keeping a low cost. To this end, we identify the problem of incremental group-level popularity prediction, and propose a novel model IGPP to address it. We first predict the group-level popularity incrementally by exploiting the incremental CANDECOMP/PARAFCAC (CP) tensor decomposition algorithm. Then, to reduce the cumulative error by incremental prediction, we propose three strategies to restart the CP decomposition. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that identifies and solves the problem of incremental group-level popularity prediction. Extensive experimental results show significant improvements of the IGPP method over other works both in the prediction accuracy and the efficiency.

Predicting the impact of online news articles – is information necessary?

We exploit the Twitter platform to create a dataset of news articles derived from tweets concerning COVID-19, and use the associated tweets to define a number of popularity measures. The focus on (potentially) biomedical news articles allows the quantity of biomedically valid information (as extracted by biomedical relation extraction) to be included in the list of explored features. Aside from forming part of a systematic correlation exploration, the features – ranging from the semantic relations through readability measures to the article’s digital content – are used within a number of machine learning classifier and regression algorithms. Unsurprisingly, the results support that for more complex articles (as determined by a readability measure) more sophisticated syntactic structure may be expected. A weak correlation is found with information within an article suggesting that other factors, such as numbers of videos, have a notable impact on the popularity of a news article. The best popularity prediction performance is obtained using a random forest machine learning algorithm, and the feature describing the quantity of biomedical information is in the top 3 most important features in almost a third of the experiments performed. Additionally, this feature is found to be more valuable than the widely used named entity recognition.

MUFFLE: Multi-Modal Fake News Influence Estimator on Twitter

To alleviate the impact of fake news on our society, predicting the popularity of fake news posts on social media is a crucial problem worthy of study. However, most related studies on fake news emphasize detection only. In this paper, we focus on the issue of fake news influence prediction, i.e., inferring how popular a fake news post might become on social platforms. To achieve our goal, we propose a comprehensive framework, MUFFLE, which captures multi-modal dynamics by encoding the representation of news-related social networks, user characteristics, and content in text. The attention mechanism developed in the model can provide explainability for social or psychological analysis. To examine the effectiveness of MUFFLE, we conducted extensive experiments on real-world datasets. The experimental results show that our proposed method outperforms both state-of-the-art methods of popularity prediction and machine-based baselines in top-k NDCG and hit rate. Through the experiments, we also analyze the feature importance for predicting fake news influence via the explainability provided by MUFFLE.

Advertising Popularity Feature Collaborative Recommendation Algorithm Based on Attention-LSTM Model

To accurately predict the click-through rate (CTR) and use it for ad recommendation, we propose a deep attention AD popularity prediction model (DAFCT) based on label recommendation technology and collaborative filtering method, which integrates content features and temporal information. First, we construct an Attention-LSTM model to capture the popularity trends and exploit the temporal information based on users’ feedback; finally, we use the concatenate method to fuse temporal information and content features and design a Deep Attention Popularity Prediction (DAVPP) algorithm to solve DAFCT. We experimentally adjust the weighted composite similarity metric parameters of Query pages and verify the scalability of the algorithm. Experimental results on the KDDCUP2012 dataset show that this model collaborative filtering and recommendation algorithm has better scalability and better recommendation quality. Compared with the Attention-LSTM model and the NFM model, the F1 score of DAFCT is improved by 9.80 and 3.07 percentage points, respectively.

Aggregating Twitter Text through Generalized Linear Regression Models for Tweet Popularity Prediction and Automatic Topic Classification

Social media platforms have become accessible resources for health data analysis. However, the advanced computational techniques involved in big data text mining and analysis are challenging for public health data analysts to apply. This study proposes and explores the feasibility of a novel yet straightforward method by regressing the outcome of interest on the aggregated influence scores for association and/or classification analyses based on generalized linear models. The method reduces the document term matrix by transforming text data into a continuous summary score, thereby reducing the data dimension substantially and easing the data sparsity issue of the term matrix. To illustrate the proposed method in detailed steps, we used three Twitter datasets on various topics: autism spectrum disorder, influenza, and violence against women. We found that our results were generally consistent with the critical factors associated with the specific public health topic in the existing literature. The proposed method could also classify tweets into different topic groups appropriately with consistent performance compared with existing text mining methods for automatic classification based on tweet contents.

A Novel Video Transmission Optimization Mechanism Based on Reinforcement Learning and Edge Computing

As we know, the video transmission traffic already constitutes 60% of Internet downlink traffic. The optimization of video transmission efficiency has become an important challenge in the network. This paper designs a video transmission optimization strategy that takes reinforcement learning and edge computing (TORE) to improve the video transmission efficiency and quality of experience. Specifically, first, we design the popularity prediction model for video requests based on the RL (reinforcement learning) and introduce the adaptive video encoding method for optimizing the efficiency of computing resource distribution. Second, we design a video caching strategy, which adopts EC (edge computing) to reduce the redundant video transmission. Last, simulations are conducted, and the experimental results fully demonstrate the improvement of video quality and response time.