Modeling a Retweet Network via an Adaptive Bayesian Approach

Twitter (and similar microblogging services) has become a central nexus for discussion of the topics of the day. Twitter data contains rich content and structured information on users’ topics of interest and behavior patterns. Correctly analyzing and modeling Twitter data enables the prediction of the user behavior and preference in a variety of practical applications, such as tweet recommendation and followee recommendation. Although a number of models have been developed on Twitter data in prior work, most of these only model the tweets from users, while neglecting their valuable retweet information in the data. Models would enhance their predictive power by incorporating users’ retweet content as well as their retweet behavior. In this paper, we propose two novel Bayesian nonparametric models, URM and UCM, on retweet data. Both of them are able to integrate the analysis of tweet text and users’ retweet behavior in the same probabilistic framework. Moreover, they both jointly model users’ interest in tweet and retweet. As nonparametric models, URM and UCM can automatically determine the parameters of the models based on input data, avoiding arbitrary parameter settings. Extensive experiments on real-world Twitter data show that both URM and UCM are superior to all the baselines, while UCM further outperforms URM, confirming the appropriateness of our models in retweet modeling.