CHESS: Learning User Correlation from Semantic-related Cascades for Diffusion Prediction

Understanding the information diffusion trajectory in online social networks has become an ever-growing prominent research direction in the information era. Users interact with social information they are interested in, and cascades record diffusion trajectories of massive social information. It implies two characteristics of diffusion cascades: topic sharing among different cascades and infected user correlation within the same cascades. However, previous works ignore these two characteristics and primarily focus on whether each infected user is correctly predicted individually, which leads to learning biased diffusion models under the data-driven mode. To address this problem, we propose a novel architecture to exploit such latent user associations among topic-related cascades. First, we leverage the hypergraph and heterogeneous graph to exploit infected user correlations jointly and generate user feature vectors. Second, we devise an enhanced cascade similarity loss function to evaluate prediction results from delay (horizontal) and rank (vertical) scopes. Furthermore, we introduce the extra predictor to alleviate the interference with the primary model. Experiments on four public datasets validate the effectiveness of our proposed method and significantly outperform existing models on hits@κ and map@κ indicators.