RAIN: Social Role-Aware Information Diffusion

Information diffusion, which studies how information is propagated in social networks, has attracted considerable research effort recently. However, most existing approaches do not distinguish social roles that nodes may play in the diffusion process. In this paper, we study the interplay between users’ social roles and their influence on information diffusion. We propose a Role-Aware INformation diffusion model (RAIN) that integrates social role recognition and diffusion modeling into a unified framework. We develop a Gibbssampling based algorithm to learn the proposed model using historical diffusion data. The proposed model can be applied to different scenarios. For instance, at the micro-level, the proposed model can be used to predict whether an individual user will repost a specific message; while at the macro-level, we can use the model to predict the scale and the duration of a diffusion process. We evaluate the proposed model on a real social media data set. Our model pe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Yang Yang, Jie Tang, Cane Wing-ki Leung, Yizhou Sun, Qicong Chen, Juanzi Li, Qiang Yang 0001
• Keywords: AAAI 2015, Intelligent Agents