Abstract
Protest event prediction using information propagation from social media is an important but challenging problem. Despite the plethora of research, the implicit relationship between social media information propagation and real-world protest events is unknown. Given some information propagating on social media, how can we tell if a protest event will occur? What features of information propagation are useful and how do these features contribute to a pending protest event? In this paper, we address these questions by presenting a novel formalized propagation tree model that captures relevant protest information propagating as precursors to protest events. We present a viewpoint of information propagation as trees which captures both temporal and structural aspects of information propagation. We construct and extract structural and temporal features daily from propagation trees. We develop a matching scheme that maps daily feature values to protest events. Finally, we build a robust prediction model that leverages propagation tree features for protest event prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on Twitter datasets across states in Australia show that our model outperforms existing state-of-the-art prediction models with an accuracy of up to 89% and F1-score of 0.84. We also provide insights on the interpretability of our features to real-world protest events.
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Notes
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The tweet can be in the form of retweet, @mentions, normal tweet etc.
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The ground truth refers to Gold Standard Record (GSR).
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SVM outperforms all other classifiers with best precision, recall and F1-score.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge Data to Decisions CRC (D2DCRC), Cooperative Research Centres Programme, and the University of South Australia for funding this research. The work has also been partially supported by ARC Discovery project DP170101306.
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Ansah, J., Kang, W., Liu, L., Liu, J., Li, J. (2018). Information Propagation Trees for Protest Event Prediction. In: Phung, D., Tseng, V., Webb, G., Ho, B., Ganji, M., Rashidi, L. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10939. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93040-4_61
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