Epidemic model based visibility estimation in Online Social Networks

The emergence of various Online Social Network (OSN) services has revolutionized the way people express themselves among their social connections and to the world. Twitter is one of the most popular OSNs, which allows its users to share ideas with their followers and public, in the form of tweets. Visibility prediction of a tweet is an interesting issue that might be useful in estimating privacy risk caused by the tweet. In this paper, we propose a technique inspired by epidemic models to predict the visibility of a tweet. Our model exploits user interest and relationship strength to predict the visibility of a tweet. The evaluation results show that one can predict the total number of likes and re-tweets of a tweet with the accuracy of approximately 89%.