Predicting popularity trend in social media networks with multi-layer temporal graph neural networks

Abstract Predicting what becomes popular on social media is crucial because it helps us understand future topics and public interests based on massive social data. Previous studies mainly focused on picking specific features and checking past statistic numbers, ignoring the hidden impact of messages passing along the complex relationships among different entities. People talk and connect with others on social media; thus, it is essential to consider how information spreads when studying social media networks. This work proposes a multi-layer temporal graph neural network (GNN) framework for predicting what will be popular on social media networks. This framework takes into account the way information spreads among different entities. The proposed method involves multi-layer relations and temporal information within a sequence of social media network snapshots. It learns the temporal representations of target entities in each snapshot and predicts how the popularity of a particular entity will change in future snapshots. The proposed method is evaluated with real-world data across four popularity trend prediction tasks. The experimental results prove that the proposed method performs better than various baselines, including traditional machine learning regression approaches, prior methods for popularity trend prediction, and other GNN models.