Blog Cascade Affinity: Analysis and Prediction

Information propagation within the blogosphere is of much importance in implementing policies, marketing research, launching new products, and other applications. In this pa-per, we take a microscopic view of the information propa-gation pattern in blogosphere by investigating blog cascade affinity. A blog cascade is a group of posts linked together discussing about the same topic, and cascade affinity refers to the phenomenon of a blog’s inclination to join a specific cascade. We identify and analyze an array of features that may affect a blogger’s cascade joining behavior and utilize these features to predict cascade affinity of blogs. Evaluated on a real dataset consisting of 873,496 posts, our svm-based prediction achieved accuracy of 0.723 measured by F1. Our experiments also showed that among all features identified, the number of friends was the most important factor affect-ing bloggers ’ inclination to join cascades