Information cascade prediction of complex networks based on physics-informed graph convolutional network

Cascade prediction aims to estimate the popularity of information diffusion in complex networks, which is beneficial to many applications from identifying viral marketing to fake news propagation in social media, estimating the scientific impact (citations) of a new publication, and so on. How to effectively predict cascade growth size has become a significant problem. Most previous methods based on deep learning have achieved remarkable results, while concentrating on mining structural and temporal features from diffusion networks and propagation paths. Whereas, the ignorance of spread dynamic information restricts the improvement of prediction performance. In this paper, we propose a novel framework called Physics-informed graph convolutional network (PiGCN) for cascade prediction, which combines explicit features (structural and temporal features) and propagation dynamic status in learning diffusion ability of cascades. Specifically, PiGCN is an end-to-end predictor, firstly splitting a given cascade into sub-cascade graph sequence and learning local structures of each sub-cascade via graph convolutional network , then adopting multi-layer perceptron to predict the cascade growth size. Moreover, our dynamic neural network, combining PDE-like equations and a deep learning method, is designed to extract potential dynamics of cascade diffusion, which captures dynamic evolution rate both on structural and temporal changes. To evaluate the performance of our proposed PiGCN model, we have conducted extensive experiment on two well-known large-scale datasets from Sina Weibo and ArXIv subject listing HEP-PH to verify the effectiveness of our model. The results of our proposed model outperform the mainstream model, and show that dynamic features have great significance for cascade size prediction.