Discerning Influence Patterns with Beta-Poisson Factorization in Microblogging Environments

Social influence analysis in microblogging services has attracted much attention in recent years. However, most previous studies were focused on measuring users' (topical) influence. Little effort has been made to discern and quantify how a user is influenced. Specifically, the fact that user i retweets a tweet from author j could be either because i is influenced by j (i.e., j is a topical authority), or simply because he is “influenced” by the...