Title
Cross-site Prediction on Social Influence for Cold-start Users in Online Social Networks
Abstract
AbstractOnline social networks (OSNs) have become a commodity in our daily life. As an important concept in sociology and viral marketing, the study of social influence has received a lot of attentions in academia. Most of the existing proposals work well on dominant OSNs, such as Twitter, since these sites are mature and many users have generated a large amount of data for the calculation of social influence. Unfortunately, cold-start users on emerging OSNs generate much less activity data, which makes it challenging to identify potential influential users among them. In this work, we propose a practical solution to predict whether a cold-start user will become an influential user on an emerging OSN, by opportunistically leveraging the user’s information on dominant OSNs. A supervised machine learning-based approach is adopted, transferring the knowledge of both the descriptive information and dynamic activities on dominant OSNs. Descriptive features are extracted from the public data on a user’s homepage. In particular, to extract useful information from the fine-grained dynamic activities that cannot be represented by the statistical indices, we use deep learning technologies to deal with the sequential activity data. Using the real data of millions of users collected from Twitter (a dominant OSN) and Medium (an emerging OSN), we evaluate the performance of our proposed framework to predict prospective influential users. Our system achieves a high prediction performance based on different social influence definitions.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1145/3409108
ACM Transactions on the Web
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Social influence, cold-start users, cross-site linking
Journal
15
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
2
1559-1131
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
7
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qingyuan Gong121.72
Yang Chen237533.50
Xinlei He355.49
Yu Xiao454646.32
Pan Hui54577309.30
Xin Wang61169111.70
Xiaoming Fu71594126.46