Vertex-Weighted Measures for Link Prediction in Hashtag Graphs

Abstract

Communications on the popular social networking platform, Twitter, can be mapped in terms of a hashtag graph, where vertices correspond to hashtags, and edges correspond to co-occurrences of hashtags within the same distinct tweet. Furthermore, a vertex in hashtag graphs can be weighted with the number of tweets a hashtag has occurred in, and edges can be weighted with the number of tweets both hashtags have co-occurred in. In this paper, we describe additions to some well-known link prediction methods that allow the weights of both vertices and edges in a weighted hashtag graph to be taken into account. We base our novel predictive additions on the assumption that more popular hashtags have a higher probability to appear with other hashtags in the future. We then apply these improved methods to 3 sets of Twitter data with the intent of predicting hashtags co-occurences in the future. Experimental results on real-life data sets consisting of over 3, 000, 000 combined unique Tweets and over 250, 000 unique hashtags show the effectiveness of the proposed models and algorithms on weighted hashtag graphs.