Predicting the Popularity of Online News from Content Metadata

Abstract

Popularity prediction of online news aims to predict the future popularity of news article prior to its publication estimating the number of shares, likes, and comments. Yet, popularity prediction is a challenging task due to various issues including difficulty to measure the quality of content and relevance of content to users; prediction difficulty of complex online interactions and information cascades; inaccessibility of context outside the web; local and geographic conditions; social network properties. This paper focuses on popularity prediction of online news by predicting whether users share an article or not, and how many users share the news adopting before publication approach. This paper proposes the gradient boosting machine for popularity prediction using features that are known before publication of articles. The proposed model shows around 1.8% improvement over previously applied techniques on a benchmark dataset. This model also indicates that features extracted from articles keywords, publication day, and the data channel are highly influential for popularity prediction.