Learning from dynamic user interaction graphs to forecast diverse social behavior

Abstract

Most of the existing graph analytics for understanding social behavior focuses on learning from static rather than dynamic graphs using hand-crafted network features or recently emerged graph embeddings learned independently from a downstream predictive task, and solving predictive (e.g., link prediction) rather than forecasting tasks directly. To address these limitations, we propose (1) a novel task - forecasting user interactions over dynamic social graphs, and (2) a novel deep learning, multi-task, node-aware attention model that focuses on forecasting social interactions, going beyond recently emerged approaches for learning dynamic graph embeddings. Our model relies on graph convolutions and recurrent layers to forecast future social behavior and interaction patterns in dynamic social graphs. We evaluate our model on the ability to forecast the number of retweets and mentions of a specific news source on Twitter (focusing on deceptive and credible news sources) with R2 of 0.79 for retweets and 0.81 for mentions. An additional evaluation includes model forecasts of user-repository interactions on GitHub and comments to a specific video on YouTube with a mean absolute error close to 2% and R2 exceeding 0.69. Our results demonstrate that learning from connectivity information over time in combination with node embeddings yields better forecasting results than when we incorporate the state-of-the-art graph embeddings e.g., Node2Vec and DeepWalk into our model. Finally, we perform in-depth analyses to examine factors that influence model performance across tasks and different graph types e.g., the influence of training and forecasting windows as well as graph topological properties.