Event detection and popularity prediction in microblogging

Abstract As one of the most influential social media platforms, microblogging is becoming increasingly popular in the last decades. Each day a large amount of events appear and spread in microblogging. The spreading of events and corresponding comments on them can greatly influence the public opinion. It is practical important to discover new emerging events in microblogging and predict their future popularity. Traditional event detection and information diffusion models cannot effectively handle our studied problem, because most existing methods focus only on event detection but ignore to predict their future trend. In this paper, we propose a new approach to detect burst novel events and predict their future popularity simultaneously. Specifically, we first detect events from online microblogging stream by utilizing multiple types of information, i.e., term frequency, and user׳s social relation. Meanwhile, the popularity of detected event is predicted through a proposed diffusion model which takes both the content and user information of the event into account. Extensive evaluations on two real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on both event detection and their popularity prediction.