Twitter cascade dataset

This dataset comprises a set of information cascades generated by Singapore Twitter users. Here a cascade is defined as a set of tweets about the same topic. This dataset was collected via the Twitter REST and streaming APIs in the following way. Starting from popular seed users (i.e., users having many followers), we crawled their follow, retweet, and user mention links. We then added those followers/followees, retweet sources, and mentioned users who state Singapore in their profile location. With this, we have a total of 184,794 Twitter user accounts. Then tweets are crawled from these users from 1 April to 31 August 2012. In all, we got 32,479,134 tweets. To identify cascades, we extracted all the URL links and hashtags from the above tweets. And these URL links and hashtags are considered as the identities of cascades. In other words, all the tweets which contain the same URL link (or the same hashtag) represent a cascade. Mathematically, a cascade is represented as a set of user-timestamp pairs. Figure 1 provides an example, i.e. cascade C = {< u1, t1 >, < u2, t2 >, < u1, t3 >, < u3, t4 >, < u4, t5 >}. For evaluation, the dataset was split into two parts: four months data for training and the last one month data for testing. Table 1summarizes the basic (count) statistics of the dataset. Each line in each file represents a cascade. The first term in each line is a hashtag or URL, the second term is a list of user-timestamp pairs. Due to privacy concerns, all user identities are anonymized.

本数据集包含由新加坡Twitter用户生成的多组信息级联（information cascades）。本数据集中的级联定义为围绕同一主题的一组推文。本数据集通过Twitter REST API与流式API按如下方式采集：首先从热门种子用户（即拥有大量粉丝的用户）出发，爬取其关注关系、转发关系与用户提及链接；随后筛选出个人资料位置标注为新加坡的粉丝/关注者、转发源用户以及被提及用户，并将其纳入采集范围。最终共得到184,794个Twitter用户账号，并于2012年4月1日至8月31日期间爬取这些用户发布的推文，累计采集到32,479,134条推文。为识别信息级联，我们从上述推文中提取所有URL链接与话题标签（hashtag），并将此类链接和标签作为级联的唯一标识。换言之，所有包含同一URL链接或同一话题标签的推文共同构成一个级联。从数学层面而言，级联可表示为一组用户-时间戳对的集合。图1给出一则示例：级联C = {<u1, t1>、<u2, t2>、<u1, t3>、<u3, t4>、<u4, t5>}。为开展评估工作，本数据集被划分为两部分：前四个月的数据用于训练，最后一个月的数据用于测试。表1汇总了本数据集的基础计数统计信息。每个数据文件中的每一行对应一个级联：每行的首个字段为话题标签或URL链接，第二个字段为用户-时间戳对的列表。出于隐私保护的考量，所有用户身份均已完成匿名化处理。