Diffusion Guided Propagation Augmentation for Popularity Prediction

Abstract

The prediction of information popularity propagation is critical for applications such as recommendation systems, targeted advertising, and social media trend analysis. Traditional approaches primarily rely on historical cascade data, often sacrificing timeliness for prediction accuracy. These methods capture aggregate diffusion patterns but fail to account for the complex temporal dynamics of early-stage propagation. In this paper, we introduce Diffusion Guided Propagation Augmentation(DGPA), a novel framework designed to improve early-stage popularity prediction. DGPA models cascade dynamics by leveraging a generative approach, where a temporal conditional interpolator serves as a noising process and forecasting as a denoising process. By iteratively generating cascade representations through a sampling procedure, DGPA effectively incorporates the evolving time steps of diffusion, significantly enhancing prediction timeliness and accuracy. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets from Twitter, Weibo, and APS demonstrate that DGPA outperforms state-of-the-art methods in early-stage popularity prediction.