Predicting the times of retweeting in microblogs

Abstract

Recently, microblog services accelerate the information propagation among peoples, leaving the traditional media like newspaper, TV, forum, blogs, and web portals far behind. Various messages are spread quickly and widely by retweeting in microblogs. In this paper, we take Sina microblog as an example, aiming to predict the possible number of retweets of an original tweet in one month according to the time series distribution of its top n retweets. In order to address the problem, we propose the concept of a tweet's lifecycle, which is mainly decided by three factors, namely, the response time, the importance of content, and the interval time distribution, and then the given time series distribution curve of its top n retweets is fitted by a two-phase function, so as to predict the number of its retweets in one month. The phases in the function are divided by the lifecycle of the original tweet and different functions are used in the two phases. Experiment results show that our solution can address the problem of predicting the times of retweeting in microblogs with a satisfying precision. © 2014 Li Kuang et al.