Understanding Information Diffusion under Interactions

Information diffusion in online social networks has attracted substantial research effort. Although recent models begin to incorporate interactions among contagions, they still don’t consider the comprehensive interactions involving users and contagions as a whole. Moreover, the interactions obtained in previous work are modeled as latent factors and thus are difficult to understand and interpret. In this paper, we investigate the contagion adoption behavior by incorporating various types of interactions into a coherent model, and propose a novel interaction-aware diffusion framework called IAD. IAD exploits the social network structures to distinguish user roles, and uses both structures and texts to categorize contagions. Experiments with large-scale Weibo dataset demonstrate that IAD outperforms the state-of-art baselines in terms of F1-score and accuracy, as well as the runtime for learning. In addition, the interactions obtained through learning reveal interesting findings, e.g., food-related contagions have the strongest capability to suppress other contagions’ propagation, while advertisement-related contagions have the weakest capability.