Relation-enhanced Diffusion Model with LightGCN for Information Diffusion Prediction

Abstract Modeling and predicting the information diffusion process on social platforms is a critical task in many real-world applications. Recent studies generally model the diffusion graph using graph neural networks to capture the implicit dependencies among users. However, existing studies construct the diffusion graph in a way which cannot fully describe the global dependencies of users due to their narrow definition of user relationship. Meanwhile, graph neural networks in these methods are not suitable for the social network scenario which has scarce node attributes. Therefore, we propose a novel diffusion graph construction method which can enhance relations among users and adopt a simplified graph convolutional operation which is suitable for diffusion prediction scenario. The learned user embedding in our model can effectively preserve the microscopic structure and the high-order proximities between users lies in both the social graph and diffusion graph. Experimental results on four real-world datasets show that the proposed model is superior to the most advanced information diffusion prediction methods.