Predicting the popularity of online article sheds light to many applications such as recommendation, advertising and information retrieval. However, there are several technical challenges to be addressed for developing the best of predictive capability. (1) The popularity fluctuates under impacts of external factors, which are unpredictable and hard to capture. (2) Content and meta-data features, largely determining the online content popularity, are usually multi-modal and nontrivial to model. (3) Besides, it also needs to figure out how to integrate temporal process and content features modeling for popularity prediction in different lifecycle stages of online articles. In this paper, we propose a Deep Fusion of Temporal process and Content features (DFTC) method to tackle them. For modeling the temporal popularity process, we adopt the recurrent neural network and convolutional neural network. For multi-modal content features, we exploit the hierarchical attention network and embedding technique. Finally, a temporal attention fusion is employed for dynamically integrating all these parts. Using datasets collected from WeChat, we show that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches on popularity prediction.

Predicting users’ activity and location preferences is of great significance in location based services. Considering that users’ activity and location preferences interplay with each other, many scholars tried to figure out the relation between users’ activities and locations for improving prediction performance. However, most previous works enforce a rigid human-defined modeling strategy to capture these two factors, either activity purpose controlling location preference or spatial region determining activity preference. Unlike existing methods, we introduce spatial-activity topics as the latent factor capturing both users’ activity and location preferences. We propose Multi-task Context Aware Recurrent Neural Network to leverage the spatial activity topic for activity and location prediction. More specifically, a novel Context Aware Recurrent Unit is designed to integrate the sequential dependency and temporal regularity of spatial activity topics. Extensive experimental results based on real-world public datasets demonstrate that the proposed model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

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Real-time forwarding prediction for predicting online contents' popularity is beneficial to various social applications for enhancing interactive social behaviors. Cascade graphs, formed by online contents' propagation, play a vital role in real-time forwarding prediction. Existing cascade graph modeling methods are inadequate to embed cascade graphs that have hub structures and deep cascade paths, or they fail to handle the short-term outbreak of forwarding amount. To this end, we propose a novel real-time forwarding prediction method that includes an effective approach for cascade graph embedding and a short-term variation sensitive method for time-series modeling, making the best of cascade graph features. Using two real world datasets, we demonstrate the significant superiority of the proposed method compared with the state-of-the-art. Our experiments also reveal interesting implications hidden in the performance differences between cascade graph embedding and time-series modeling.