Cascade Dynamics Modeling with Attention-based Recurrent Neural Network

An ability of modeling and predicting the cascades of resharing is crucial to understanding information propagation and to launching campaign of viral marketing. Conventional methods for cascade prediction heavily depend on the hypothesis of diffusion models, e.g., independent cascade model and linear threshold model. Recently, researchers attempt to circumvent the problem of cascade prediction using sequential models (e.g., recurrent neural network, namely RNN) that do not require knowing the underlying diffusion model. Existing sequential models employ a chain structure to capture the memory effect. However, for cascade prediction, each cascade generally corresponds to a diffusion tree, causing cross-dependence in cascade---one sharing behavior could be triggered by its non-immediate predecessor in the memory chain. In this paper, we propose to an attention-based RNN to capture the cross-dependence in cascade. Furthermore, we introduce a \emph{coverage} strategy to combat the misallocation of attention caused by the memoryless of traditional attention mechanism. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real world datasets demonstrate the proposed models outperform state-of-the-art models at both cascade prediction and inferring diffusion tree.