Discovering latent influence in online social activities via shared cascade poisson processes

  • Authors:
  • Tomoharu Iwata;Amar Shah;Zoubin Ghahramani

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom;University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 19th ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Many people share their activities with others through online communities. These shared activities have an impact on other users' activities. For example, users are likely to become interested in items that are adopted (e.g. liked, bought and shared) by their friends. In this paper, we propose a probabilistic model for discovering latent influence from sequences of item adoption events. An inhomogeneous Poisson process is used for modeling a sequence, in which adoption by a user triggers the subsequent adoption of the same item by other users. For modeling adoption of multiple items, we employ multiple inhomogeneous Poisson processes, which share parameters, such as influence for each user and relations between users. The proposed model can be used for finding influential users, discovering relations between users and predicting item popularity in the future. We present an efficient Bayesian inference procedure of the proposed model based on the stochastic EM algorithm. The effectiveness of the proposed model is demonstrated by using real data sets in a social bookmark sharing service.