  Sudden bursts of information cascades can lead to unexpected consequences
such as extreme opinions, changes in fashion trends, and uncontrollable spread
of rumors. It has become an important problem on how to effectively predict a
cascade' size in the future, especially for large-scale cascades on social
media platforms such as Twitter and Weibo. However, existing methods are
insufficient in dealing with this challenging prediction problem. Conventional
methods heavily rely on either hand crafted features or unrealistic
assumptions. End-to-end deep learning models, such as recurrent neural
networks, are not suitable to work with graphical inputs directly and cannot
handle structural information that is embedded in the cascade graphs. In this
paper, we propose a novel deep learning architecture for cascade growth
prediction, called CasGCN, which employs the graph convolutional network to
extract structural features from a graphical input, followed by the application
of the attention mechanism on both the extracted features and the temporal
information before conducting cascade size prediction. We conduct experiments
on two real-world cascade growth prediction scenarios (i.e., retweet popularity
on Sina Weibo and academic paper citations on DBLP), with the experimental
results showing that CasGCN enjoys a superior performance over several baseline
methods, particularly when the cascades are of large scale.
