HID: Hierarchical Multiscale Representation Learning for Information Diffusion

Multiscale modeling has yielded immense success on various machine learning tasks. However, it has not been properly explored for the prominent task of information diffusion, which aims to understand how information propagates along users in online social networks. For a specific user, whether and when to adopt a piece of information propagated from another user is affected by complex interactions, and thus, is very challenging to model. Current state-of-the-art techniques invoke deep neural models with vector representations of users. In this paper, we present a Hierarchical Information Diffusion (HID) framework by integrating user representation learning and multiscale modeling. The proposed framework can be layered on top of all information diffusion techniques that leverage user representations, so as to boost the predictive power and learning efficiency of the original technique. Extensive experiments on three real-world datasets showcase the superiority of our method.