A Unified Information Diffusion Prediction Model Based on Multi-task Learning.

The prediction of online information diffusion trends on social networks is crucial for understanding people’s interests and concerns, and has many real-world applications in fields such as business, politics and social security. Existing research on information diffusion prediction has predominantly focused on either macro level prediction of the future popularity of online information or micro level user activation prediction. However, information diffusion prediction on micro or macro level only may lead to one-sided prediction results, and there is a lack of research on implementing micro and macro level diffusion prediction tasks at the same time. Since micro and macro level diffusion prediction tasks are related to each other, we propose a unified information diffusion model which can jointly predicting the micro level user activation probability and macro level information popularity based on multi-task learning framework. We utilize graph neural network to learn user representation from both the information cascades and social network structure. Comparing with micro and macro level baseline methods separately, the prediction results of our proposed model outperform all baseline methods and proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.