Predicting the Top-N Popular Videos via a Cross-Domain Hybrid Model

Abstract

Predicting the top-N popular videos and their future views for a large batch of newly uploaded videos is of great commercial value to online video services (OVSs). Although many attempts have been made on video popularity prediction, the existing models has a much lower performance in predicting the top-N popular videos than that of the entire video set. The reason for this phenomenon is that most videos in an OVS system are unpopular, so models preferentially learn the popularity trends of unpopular videos to improve their performance on the entire video set. However, in most cases, it is critical to predict the performance on the top-N popular videos, which is the focus of this study. The challenge for the task are as follows. First, popular and unpopular videos may have similar early view patterns. Second, prediction models that are overly dependent on early view patterns limit the effects of other features. To address these challenges, we propose a novel multifactor differential influence prediction model based on multivariate linear regression. The model is designed to improve the discovery of popular videos and their popularity trends are learnt by enhancing the discriminative power of early patterns for different popularity trends and by optimizing the utilization of multisource data. We evaluate the proposed model using real-world YouTube data, and extensive experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.