A Point Process Framework for Predicting Dynamics of Popularity of Content in Online Social Networks

Abstract

In this paper, we extend previous models to predict the popularity of user-generated content for online social networks (OSNs). We focus on Twitter as the most popular and widely used micro-blogging online social network, and specifically measure the popularity of a brand’s tweet by analyzing the time-series path of its subsequent activities (i.e. retweets, replies and marks as favorite) using multivariate marked Hawkes process models. Self and mutually exciting point process models as a multivariate class are adopted to simulate popularity growth patterns of brand post contents on Twitter. While previous self-exciting point process models aggregate the three types of events into one stream of information and therefore ignore exciting effects among different types of events, this study focuses on incorporating the event type into the predictive models for content popularity, explicitly looking at the effects of various types of users’ activities on Twitter. We aim to develop a mutually exciting point process model in order to incorporate such effects among different types of events. Our results suggest that the mutual-exciting point process model outperforms the self-exciting point process model to predict the popularity of online content, as it is able to capture mutual excitement effects and cross interactions between a sequence of events from one type to another. These results are useful in developing and executing a plan for online activities by the brand owners.

Keywords: Online social networks, online content, popularity, point process, Hawkes process, self-exciting, mutual-exciting