Understanding information diffusion with psychological field dynamic

Abstract

Several approaches focus on how to automatically capture the latent features from original diffusion data and predict the future scale of cascades utilizing a black box framework. However, they ignore the penetrating insight into the underlying mechanism that how each participant is involved in the cascade. In this work, we bridge the gap between prediction and understanding of information diffusion by incorporating deep learning techniques and social psychology. To characterize individual participation driven by both subjective and objective impetus and integrate it into the macro-level cascade, we propose an end-to-end model, named PFDID, which is designed based on the field dynamics theory of psychology, including the intrinsic cognition field and the extrinsic environment field. We represent these two field dynamics respectively with the pairwise semantic relation between the message itself and corresponding comment and the forwarder’s micro-community activity embedding to provide educated explanations for forwarding behaviour. Afterwards, the cross infusion mechanism is designed to calculate the mutual influence of inhomogeneous field dynamics inside users and cross influence of homogeneous field dynamics among individuals, whose output is fed into the diffusion network aggregation layer for the cascade size prediction. Extensive experiments on two typical social networks, Sina Weibo and Twitter, manifest that the proposed PFDID outperforms state-of-the-art approaches. Our model achieves excellent prediction results, with MSLE = 1.856 on Sina Weibo and MSLE = 1.962 on Twitter, providing 6.54% and 10.53% relative performance gains, respectively. Furthermore, the interpretability is also discussed based on detailed visualization. We observe that the psychological impetus behind social behaviour varies mainly following two patterns with the spread of information, including gradual change and joint influence. Additionally, the indirect dependencies have also been verified.