Rethinking relation between model stacking and recurrent neural networks for social media prediction

Popularity prediction of social posts is one of the most critical issues for social media analysis and understanding. In this paper, we discover a more dominant feature representation of text information, as well as propose a singe ensemble learning model to obtain the popularity scores, for social media prediction challenge. However, most social media prediction techniques focus on predicting the popularity score of social posts based on a single model, such as deep learning-based or ensemble learning-based approaches. However, it is well-known that the model stacking strategy is a more effective way to boost the performance on various regression tasks. In this paper, we also show that the model stacking can be modeled as a simple recurrent neural network problem with comparable performance on predicting popularity scores. Firstly, a single strong baseline is proposed based on the deep neural network with a prediction branch. Then, the partial feature maps of the last layer of our strong baseline are used to establish a new branch with an isolated predictor. It is easy to obtain multi-prediction by repeating the above two steps. These preliminary predicted scores are then formed as the input of the recurrent unit to learn the final predicted scores, called Recurrent Stacking Model (RSM). Our experiments show that the proposed ensemble learning approach outperforms other state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the proposed RSM also shows the superiority over our ensemble learning approach, having verified that the model stacking problem can be transformed into the training problem of a recurrent neural network.