Deep Collaborative Embedding for information cascade prediction Abstract   Recently, information cascade prediction has attracted increasing interest from researchers, but it is far from being well solved partly due to the three defects of the existing works. First, the existing works often assume an underlying information diffusion model, which is impractical in real world due to the complexity of information diffusion. Second, the existing works often ignore the prediction of the infection order, which also plays an important role in social network analysis. At last, the existing works often depend on the requirement of underlying diffusion networks which are likely unobservable in practice. In this paper, we aim at the prediction of both node infection and infection order without requirement of the knowledge about the underlying diffusion mechanism and the diffusion network, where the challenges are twofold. The first is what cascading characteristics of nodes should be captured and how to capture them, and the second is that how to model the nonlinear features of nodes in information cascades. To address these challenges, we propose a novel model called Deep Collaborative Embedding (DCE) for information cascade prediction, which can capture not only the node structural property but also two kinds of node cascading characteristics. We propose an autoencoder based collaborative embedding framework to learn the node embeddings with cascade collaboration and node collaboration, in which way the nonlinearity of information cascades can be effectively captured. The results of extensive experiments conducted on realworld datasets verify the effectiveness of our approach.

Joint embedding of structure and features via graph convolutional networks The creation of social ties is largely determined by the entangled effects of peopleu0027s similarities in terms of individual characters and friends. However, feature and structural characters of people usually appear to be correlated, making it difficult to determine which has greater responsibility in the formation of the emergent network structure. We propose emphAN2VEC, a node embedding method which ultimately aims at disentangling the information shared by the structure of a network and the features of its nodes. Building on the recent developments of Graph Convolutional Networks (GCN), we develop a multitask GCN Variational Autoencoder where different dimensions of the generated embeddings can be dedicated to encoding feature information, network structure, and shared featurenetwork information. We explore the interaction between these disentangled characters by comparing the embedding reconstruction performance to a baseline case where no shared information is extracted. We use synthetic datasets with different levels of interdependency between feature and network characters and show (i) that shallow embeddings relying on shared information perform better than the corresponding reference with unshared information, (ii) that this performance gap increases with the correlation between network and feature structure, and (iii) that our embedding is able to capture joint information of structure and features. Our method can be relevant for the analysis and prediction of any featured network structure ranging from online social systems to network medicine.