A Framework for Policy Information Popularity Prediction in New Media

With the rapid development and wide application of new media, predicting the popularity of policy information on new media is of great significance for understanding and managing public opinion. However, the complexity of the diffusion patterns of policy information has brought great challenges for predicting the popularity of such information. Inspired by the methods of popularity prediction for short text information from social networks, we propose a framework for the popularity prediction of policy information. In our framework, first, the features of policy information are extracted from three dimensions: contextual information, social information and textual information. Then, effective features, such as the topic distribution, popularity competition intensity and hot information relevance, are identified by empirical analysis. Finally, the effective features are input into the prediction model to predict the popularity of policy information. We evaluate the performance of our proposed framework using a real-world dataset and the experimental results show that the framework can efficiently predict the popularity of policy information and that the features that we used are effective in improving the accuracy of policy information popularity prediction. The accurate prediction result could benefit policy makers, allowing them to make better decisions, understand and manage public opinion.