  Prediction of popularity has profound impact for social media, since it
offers opportunities to reveal individual preference and public attention from
evolutionary social systems. Previous research, although achieves promising
results, neglects one distinctive characteristic of social data, i.e.,
sequentiality. For example, the popularity of online content is generated over
time with sequential post streams of social media. To investigate the
sequential prediction of popularity, we propose a novel prediction framework
called Deep Temporal Context Networks (DTCN) by incorporating both temporal
context and temporal attention into account. Our DTCN contains three main
components, from embedding, learning to predicting. With a joint embedding
network, we obtain a unified deep representation of multi-modal user-post data
in a common embedding space. Then, based on the embedded data sequence over
time, temporal context learning attempts to recurrently learn two adaptive
temporal contexts for sequential popularity. Finally, a novel temporal
attention is designed to predict new popularity (the popularity of a new
user-post pair) with temporal coherence across multiple time-scales.
Experiments on our released image dataset with about 600K Flickr photos
demonstrate that DTCN outperforms state-of-the-art deep prediction algorithms,
with an average of 21.51% relative performance improvement in the popularity
prediction (Spearman Ranking Correlation).
