Virality and Susceptibility in Information Diffusions

Abstract

Viral diffusion allows a piece of information to widely and quickly spread within the network of users through word-ofmouth. In this paper, we study the problem of modeling both item and user factors that contribute to viral diffusion in Twitter network. We identify three behaviorial factors, namely user virality, user susceptibility and item virality, that contribute to viral diffusion. Instead of modeling these factors independently as done in previous research, we propose a model that measures all the factors simultaneously considering their mutual dependencies. The model has been evaluated on both synthetic and real datasets. The experiments show that our model outperforms the existing ones for synthetic data with ground truth labels. Our model also performs well for predicting the hashtags that have higher retweet likelihood. We finally present case examples that illustrate how the models differ from one another.