World Wide Web

Pure mathematics

Exploit

Chromatography

Social psychology

Computer security

Cascade

Field (mathematics)

Viral marketing

Computer science

Psychology

Mathematics

Politics

Social media

Political science

Categorization

Data science

Artificial intelligence

Representation (politics)

Information retrieval

Chemistry

Popularity

ACM Computing Surveys

The deluge of digital information in our daily life—from user-generated content, such as microblogs and scientific papers, to online business, such as viral marketing and advertising—offers unprecedented opportunities to explore and exploit the trajectories and structures of the evolution of information cascades. Abundant research efforts, both academic and industrial, have aimed to reach a better understanding of the mechanisms driving the spread of information and quantifying the outcome of information diffusion. This article presents a comprehensive review and categorization of information popularity prediction methods, from feature engineering and stochastic processes , through graph representation , to deep learning-based approaches . Specifically, we first formally define different types of information cascades and summarize the perspectives of existing studies. We then present a taxonomy that categorizes existing works into the aforementioned three main groups as well as the main subclasses in each group, and we systematically review cutting-edge research work. Finally, we summarize the pros and cons of existing research efforts and outline the open challenges and opportunities in this field.

A Survey of Information Cascade Analysis