Public Opinion Field Effect and Hawkes Process Join Hands for Information Popularity Prediction

Junliang Li, Yajun Yang, Yujia Zhang, Qinghua Hu, Alan Zhao, Hong Gao

Abstract: Information popularity prediction, aiming to predict the growth of user participation in a trending topic diffusion, is a fundamental task in social networks. Existing methods often treat information diffusion as a single independent process, ignoring the ``public opinion field effect'' where multiple trending topics coexist and compete for user attention simultaneously. Inspired by Hawkes theory, we propose a novel Hawkes-process-based learning model for information popularity prediction, which takes into account both the temporal correlation among users' propagation behaviors in several topics diffusion and public opinion field effect in social networks. We first propose an improved neural Hawkes process to capture comprehensive propagation law from multiple dimensions and then propose a novel public opinion field paradigm based on the improved Hawkes process and cascade structure. We design a novel learning framework incorporating the public opinion field paradigm to extract high-quality representations for information popularity prediction. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets validate that our model significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art competitors.