A novel multimodal online news popularity prediction model based on ensemble learning

Abstract

AbstractThe prediction of news popularity is having substantial importance for the digital advertisement community in terms of selecting and engaging users. Traditional approaches are based on empirical data collected through surveys and applied statistical measures to prove a hypothesis. However, predicting news popularity based on statistical measures applied to past data is highly questionable. Therefore, in this article, we predict news popularity using machine learning classification models and deep residual neural network models. Articles are usually made up of textual content and in many cases, images are also used. Although it is evident that the appropriate amount of textual data is required to extract features and create models, image data is also helpful in gaining useful information. In this article, we present a novel multimodal online news popularity prediction model based on ensemble learning. This research work acts as a guide for extensive feature engineering, feature extraction, feature selection and effective modelling to create a robust news popularity Prediction Model. Three kinds of features—meta‐features, text features and image features are used to design an influential and robust model. The relative error performance measure Root Mean Squared logarithmic error (RMSLE) is used to quantify the popularity prediction error. Further, the RMSLE outcome shows 0.351 which is the lowest error value given by the proposed model. Further, the most important features are also sought out to show the dependence of the best‐fit model on text and image features.