Co-Evolving Popularity Prediction in Temporal Bipartite Networks: A Heuristics Based Model

One of the big challenges of our modern life is to find the right items or contents on the Internet and particularly in social media. One way of addressing the information overload problem in social media is to predict the future trends and popularity of online items. The popularity of an item can be measured by its attractiveness, i.e., the number of times it is being used. This popularity prediction can be translated to a link prediction and ranking problem, which aims to predict the link gain of the items in a user-item interaction network. User-item interactions in an online environment can be modelled as a bipartite network, where a link represents an event, reflecting a user buys or collects an item. Popularity prediction problem in temporal bipartite networks is of great interest to researchers. In this study, we propose a heuristic based model which only consider nodes collective link gain in a recent past time window of time as well as total link gain. To evaluate our model’s efficiency, we tested them on co-evolving social media items. We also evaluated the models’ performance on five information retrieval metrics (i.e., Area Under the Receiver Operating Characteristic, Kendall’s rank correlation tau, Precision, Novelty, and temporal novelty). The proposed model does not need hyper-parameter learning, which makes it the best choice for highly temporal and data streaming scenarios.