A GAN-based Framework for Modeling Hashtag Popularity Dynamics Using Assistive Information

Temporal point process (TPP) models have hitherto been moderately good at nowcasting hashtag popularity, but have been very poor at forecasting due to insufficient modeling of Twitter microdynamics. Recent studies have shown that the highly fluctuating nature of hashtag popularity dynamics is due to the influence of two external factors: (i) hashtag-tweet reinforcement and (ii) inter-hashtag competition. In this paper, we propose a marked TPP based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) which can seamlessly incorporate the assistive information necessary to capture the above effects and successfully forecast distant popularity trends. To achieve this, we employ a unique linear semi-autoregressive model for mark generation and couple the time and mark generative aspects. On seven diverse datasets crawled from Twitter covering several real-world events, our model yields remarkably stable performance in predicting hashtag popularity in diverse situations and offers a substantial improvement over the existing state of the art generative models.