RTPMF: Leveraging User and Message Embeddings for Retweeting Behavior Prediction

Abstract

Understanding retweeting mechanism and predicting retweeting behavior is an important and valuable task in user behavior analysis. In this paper, aiming at providing a general method for improving retweeting behavior prediction performance, we propose a probabilistic matrix factorization model (RTPMF) incorporating user social network information and message semantic relationship. The contributions of this paper are three-fold: (1) We convert predicting user retweeting behavior problem to solve a probabilistic matrix factorization problem; (2) Following the intuition that user social network relationship will affect the retweeting behavior, we extensively study how to model social information to improve the prediction performance; and (3) We also incorporate message semantic embedding to constrain the objective function by making a full use of additional the messages’ content-based and structure-based features. The empirical results and analysis demonstrate that our method significantly outperform the state-of-the-art approaches.