Prediction In A Microblog Hybrid Network Using Bonacich Potential

Microblogs such as Twitter support a rich variety of user interactions using hashtags, urls, retweets and mentions. Microblogs are an exemplar of a hybrid network; there is an explicit network of followers, as well as an implicit network of users who retweet other users, and users who mention other users. These networks are important proxies for influence. In this paper, we develop a comprehensive behavioral model of an individual user and her interactions in the hybrid network. We choose a focal user and predict those users who will be influenced by her, and will retweet and/or mention the focal user, in the near future. We define a potential function, based on a hybrid network, which reflects the likelihood of a candidate user being influenced by, and having a specific type of link to, a focal user, in the future. We show that the potential function based prediction model converges to the Bonacich centrality metric. We develop a fast unsupervised solution which approximates the future hybrid network and the future Bonacich potential. We perform an extensive evaluation over a microblog network and a stream of tweets from Twitter. Our solution outperforms several baseline methods including ones based on singular value decomposition (SVD) and a supervised Ranking SVM.