Temporal effects in trend prediction: identifying the most popular nodes in the future

PLoS One. 2015 Mar 25;10(3):e0120735. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0120735. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Prediction is an important problem in different science domains. In this paper, we focus on trend prediction in complex networks, i.e. to identify the most popular nodes in the future. Due to the preferential attachment mechanism in real systems, nodes' recent degree and cumulative degree have been successfully applied to design trend prediction methods. Here we took into account more detailed information about the network evolution and proposed a temporal-based predictor (TBP). The TBP predicts the future trend by the node strength in the weighted network with the link weight equal to its exponential aging. Three data sets with time information are used to test the performance of the new method. We find that TBP have high general accuracy in predicting the future most popular nodes. More importantly, it can identify many potential objects with low popularity in the past but high popularity in the future. The effect of the decay speed in the exponential aging on the results is discussed in detail.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Internet
  • Models, Theoretical*

Grants and funding

This paper is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (61340058) and the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (LZ14F020001).