LMPP: A Large Margin Point Process Combining Reinforcement and Competition for Modeling Hashtag Popularity

Predicting the popularity dynamics of Twitter hashtags has a broad spectrum of applications. Existing works have primarily focused on modeling the popularity of individual tweets rather than the underlying hashtags. As a result, they fail to consider several realistic factors contributing to hashtag popularity. In this paper, we propose Large Margin Point Process (LMPP), a probabilistic framework that integrates hashtag-tweet influence and hashtaghashtag competitions, the two factors which play important roles in hashtag propagation. Furthermore, while considering the hashtag competitions, LMPP looks into the variations of popularity rankings of the competing hashtags across time. Extensive experiments on seven real datasets demonstrate that LMPP outperforms existing popularity prediction approaches by a significant margin. Additionally, LMPP can accurately predict the relative rankings of competing hashtags, offering additional advantage over the state-of-the-art baselines.