A hierarchical model of non-homogeneous Poisson processes for Twitter retweets

Abstract: We present a hierarchical model of non-homogeneous Poisson processes (NHPP) for information diffusion on online social media, in particular Twitter retweets. The retweets of each original tweet are modelled by a NHPP, for which the intensity function is a product of time-decaying components and another component that depends on the follower count of the original tweet author. The latter allows us to explain or predict the ultimate retweet count by a network centrality-related covariate. The inference algorithm enables the Bayes factor to be computed, in order to facilitate model selection. Finally, the model is applied to the retweet data sets of two hashtags.