TensorCast: Forecasting with Context Using Coupled Tensors (Best Paper Award)

Given an heterogeneous social network, can we forecast its future? Can we predict who will start using a given hashtag on twitter? Can we leverage side information, such as who retweets or follows whom, to improve our membership forecasts? We present TensorCast, a novel method that forecasts time-evolving networks more accurately than current state of the art methods by incorporating multiple data sources in coupled tensors. TensorCast is (a) scalable, being linearithmic on the number of connections; (b) effective, achieving over 20% improved precision on top-1000 forecasts of community members; (c) general, being applicable to data sources with different structure. We run our method on multiple real-world networks, including DBLP and a Twitter temporal network with over 310 million non-zeros, where we predict the evolution of the activity of the use of political hashtags.