Behavior and Regularity Analysis of Online Topic Spreading

摘要

The spread of online topics,which is a complex socio-psychological and information dissemination process,can significantly influence the online public opinion. The behavior of online topics spreading is explored and its regularity is attempted to analyze. A general model for the spread of online topics is introduced,and the differential equation that describes the velocity of an online topic's spreading is derived. The velocity of an online topic's spread indicates the level of the topic's development and reflects its popularity over time. The proposed model has been theoretically analyzed and empirically studied,respectively. By analyzing the data set from a famous Internet forum,it is shown that the development of spread velocity of online topics has some certain features and our model matches the laws of reality. This method,which is suitable for forecasting the development trend of online topics' spread velocity in short term,is also critical to the success of online topics' regularity analysis.