Abstract

This study aims at constructing a microblog influence prediction model and revealing how the user, time, and content features of microblog entries about public health emergencies affect the influence of microblog entries. Microblog entries about the Ebola outbreak are selected as data sets. The BM25 latent Dirichlet allocation model (LDA-BM25) is used to extract topics from the microblog entries. A microblog influence prediction model is proposed by using the random forest method. Results reveal that the proposed model can predict the influence of microblog entries about public health emergencies with a precision rate reaching 88.8%. The individual features that play a role in the influence of microblog entries, as well as their influence tendencies are also analyzed. The proposed microblog influence prediction model consists of user, time, and content features. It makes up the deficiency that content features are often ignored by other microblog influence prediction models. The roles of the three features in the influence of microblog entries are also discussed.

Keywords: influence prediction;microblog;public health emergency;topical features;random forest;latent Dirichlet allocation