A Bayesian approach for predicting the popularity of tweets

DOI10.1214/14-AOAS741zbMATH Open1304.62147arXiv1304.6777MaRDI QIDQ484024FDOQ484024

Authors: Tauhid Zaman, Emily B. Fox, Eric T. Bradlow 

Publication date: 17 December 2014

Published in: The Annals of Applied Statistics (Search for Journal in Brave)

Abstract: We predict the popularity of short messages called tweets created in the micro-blogging site known as Twitter. We measure the popularity of a tweet by the time-series path of its retweets, which is when people forward the tweet to others. We develop a probabilistic model for the evolution of the retweets using a Bayesian approach, and form predictions using only observations on the retweet times and the local network or "graph" structure of the retweeters. We obtain good step ahead forecasts and predictions of the final total number of retweets even when only a small fraction (i.e., less than one tenth) of the retweet path is observed. This translates to good predictions within a few minutes of a tweet being posted, and has potential implications for understanding the spread of broader ideas, memes, or trends in social networks.

Full work available at URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/1304.6777

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zbMATH Keywords

Bayesian inferenceforecastingtime seriessocial networksTwitter

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Bayesian inference (62F15) Time series, auto-correlation, regression, etc. in statistics (GARCH) (62M10) Inference from stochastic processes and prediction (62M20) Applications of statistics to social sciences (62P25) Economic time series analysis (91B84) Graphical methods in statistics (62A09) Social networks; opinion dynamics (91D30)

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• A Bayesian approach for predicting the popularity of tweets

Cited In (11)

• Predicting the popularity of tweets using internal and external knowledge: an empirical Bayes type approach
• Marked self-exciting point process modelling of information diffusion on twitter
• Modelling of trends in Twitter using retweet graph dynamics
• Group level social media popularity prediction by MRGB and Adam optimization
• Predicting retweeting behavior based on BPNN in emergency incidents
• Evolutionary prediction of nonstationary event popularity dynamics of Weibo social network using time-series characteristics
• Enhancing social media post popularity prediction with visual content
• Pairwise influences in dynamic choice: network-based model and application
• A Bayesian approach for predicting the popularity of tweets
• A short-term trend prediction model of topic over Sina Weibo dataset
• A short-term prediction model of topic popularity on microblogs

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