A predictive model for the temporal dynamics of information diffusion in online social networks

Abstract

Today, online social networks have become powerful tools for the spread of information. They facilitate the rapid and large-scale propagation of content and the consequences of an information -- whether it is favorable or not to someone, false or true -- can then take considerable proportions. Therefore it is essential to provide means to analyze the phenomenon of information dissemination in such networks. Many recent studies have addressed the modeling of the process of information diffusion, from a topological point of view and in a theoretical perspective, but we still know little about the factors involved in it. With the assumption that the dynamics of the spreading process at the macroscopic level is explained by interactions at microscopic level between pairs of users and the topology of their interconnections, we propose a practical solution which aims to predict the temporal dynamics of diffusion in social networks. Our approach is based on machine learning techniques and the inference of time-dependent diffusion probabilities from a multidimensional analysis of individual behaviors. Experimental results on a real dataset extracted from Twitter show the interest and effectiveness of the proposed approach as well as interesting recommendations for future investigation.