Coupled Graph Neural Networks for Predicting the Popularity of Online Content

Predicting the popularity of online content in social network is an important problem for the practice of information dissemination, advertising, and recommendation. Previous methods mainly leverage demographics, temporal and structural patterns of early adopters for popularity prediction. These methods ignore the interaction between early adopters and potential adopters or the interactions among potential adopters over social networks. Consequently, they fail to capture the cascading effect triggered by early adopters in social networks, and thus have limited predictive power. In this paper, we consider the problem of network-aware popularity prediction, leveraging both early adopters and social networks among users for popularity prediction. We propose a novel method, namely Coupled-GNNs, which use two coupled graph neural networks to capture the cascading effect in information diffusion. One graph neural network models the interpersonal influence, gated by the adoption state of users. The other graph neural network models the adoption state of users via interpersonal influence from their neighbors. Through such an iterative aggregation of the neighborhood, the proposed method naturally captures the cascading effect of information diffusion in social networks. Experiments conducted on both synthetic data and real-world Sina Weibo data demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for popularity prediction.