UserRBPM: User Retweet Behavior Prediction with Graph Representation Learning

Abstract

Social and information networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Weibo have become the main social platforms for the public to share and exchange information, where we can easily access friends’ activities and in turn be influenced by them. Consequently, the analysis and modeling of user retweet behavior prediction have an important application value, such as information dissemination, public opinion monitoring, and product recommendation. Most of the existing solutions for user retweeting behavior prediction are usually based on network topology maps of information dissemination or designing various handcrafted rules to extract user-specific and network-specific features. However, these methods are very complex or heavily dependent on the knowledge of domain experts. Inspired by the successful use of neural networks in representation learning, we design a framework, UserRBPM, to explore potential driving factors and predictable signals in user retweet behavior. We use the graph embedding technology to extract the structural attributes of the ego network, consider the drivers of social influence from the spatial and temporal levels, and use graph convolutional networks and the graph attention mechanism to learn its potential social representation and predictive signals. Experimental results show that our proposed UserRBPM framework can significantly improve prediction performance and express social influence better than traditional feature engineering-based approaches.