Epidemic model based visibility estimation
in Online Social Networks
Nemi Chandra Rathore
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Patna
Patna, Bihar, India.
Email: nemi@iitp.ac.in
Abstract—The emergence of various Online So-
cial Network (OSN) services has revolutionized the
way people express themselves among their social
connections and to the world. Twitter is one of the
most popular OSNs, which allows its users to share
ideas with their followers and public, in the form of
tweets. Visibility prediction of a tweet is an interesting
issue that might be useful in estimating privacy risk
caused by the tweet. In this paper, we propose a
technique inspired by epidemic models to predict the
visibility of a tweet. Our model exploits user interest
and relationship strength to predict the visibility of
a tweet. The evaluation results show that one can
predict the total number of likes and re-tweets of a
tweet with the accuracy of approximately 89%.
Keywords—On-line Social Network; Privacy; Vis-
ibility Prediction; Information Diffusion; Forwarding
Probability; Keyword Extraction.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Online Social Networks (OSNs) are web-based
services that offer users to create articulated virtual
social interaction network with others as per their
interest. In recent years, the number of Internet
users has increased tremendously worldwide due
to various reasons. This phenomenon has boosted
the growth of various social network sites such
as Facebook1 , Twitter2 and many more. These
platforms allow users to share about ideas, events,
actions, activities, feelings with their contacts or
even with the public as well. These massages may
be in the variety of formats like text, audio, video,
1 www.facebook.com
2 www.twitter.com
978-1-5386-5314-2/18/$31.00 ©2018 IEEE
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Somanath Tripathy
Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Indian Institute of Technology Patna
Patna, Bihar, India
Email: som@iitp.ac.in
picture, animation and so on. Twitter is also one of
the popular micro-blogging services that allows its
users to share messages with the maximum length
of 280 characters, called tweets.
Most of the OSN users spend a significant
amount of time on such social sites on a regular
basis. They share a variety of information on these
sites in form of their profile and posts but do not
have any idea about their audience. All of these
objects might reveal highly sensitive and personal
information about users. For example a user’s OSN
profile typically includes her/his gender, sexual
orientation, email, education, profession and so on.
Further, users voluntarily publish variety of infor-
mation at OSN using different data/activity sharing
services offered by OSN. This huge amount of
personal information about users on such sites
attract malicious users, who might misuse that
information in order to launch various kind of
attacks [1], [2], [3], [4].
Therefore, OSNs like Twitter urgently requires
a mechanism that allows its users to know who
can access their tweets and who are not. Presently,
Twitter allows its users to make all the tweets either
public or private. If users choose the public setting
(default one), then their tweets become accessible
to even non-twitter users. But, tweets of users with
private settings become available to followers only.
Such kind of settings do not offer enough privacy to
the users. Hence, methods to measure and restrict
the visibility of a tweet need to be developed.
We firmly believe that an estimate of the visi-
bility of a tweet might help in controlling potential
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 privacy leakages caused by a tweet. Here, by the
visibility (or publicity)3 of a tweet, we mean how
much re-tweets or likes a tweet might get. Hence,
in this paper, we propose a model inspired by
epidemic models for estimating the publicity of
a tweet. The model exploits follower’s interest in
the topic associated with a tweet, follower’s trust
in forwarding user of the tweet and topology of
the local graph of the source user of the tweet.
Another objective of this study is to know whether
user behavioral parameters such as user interest,
trust and topological attributes like the number
of followers (out-degree) have any impact on the
visibility of a tweet or not. The prediction of the
publicity of a tweet also has other applications like
viral marketing, information propagation, influence
measurement.
The main contributions of this paper are as
follows:
• We proposed a model inspired by epidemic
models [5], [6] of information diffusion to
predict the publicity of a tweet using user
interest, trust, number of followers and hop
count.
• We used Naive Bayes, Multinomial Naive
Bayes and Linear SVC models for extract-
ing topic from tweets. During the study,
we find that the Multinomial Naive Bayes
classifier gives highest classification accu-
racy which confirms that for small text
data like tweets Multinomial Naive Bayes
outperforms Linear SVC.[7].
Our paper is organized into total six sections.
The Section-II gives a brief review of the related
work. In Section-III, we have presented our pro-
posed model. Further, Section-IV provides details
about the implementation and evaluation of the
proposed model. Finally, in Section-V, we have
presented the results of the evaluation and con-
cluded our work in Section-VI with future direc-
tions.
II. R ELATED W ORK
The research about visibility prediction of user
contents on OSN platforms is in its early stage.
3 In this paper, we use visibility and publicity as synonym
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Cristofaro et al. [8], presented a privacy-preserving
model, inspired from Twitter where a tweeter u
encrypts all his tweets to control their visibility.
Each tweet t has an associated Access Control
List (ACL) defined by u which governs who can
access t. But, this solution is not practicable for
Twitter as it requires modification in the present
architecture of Twitter. Hogg et al. [9], proposed
a stochastic model to predict user response for a
post on twitter and focus only in predicting user
behavior. Zhu et al. [10] used the visibility of a
node to predict link formation among users on
Twitter. They define visibility as a measure of
efforts required to discover a user on OSN.
Some works have focused on measuring the
influence of a user on other users [11], [12],
[13], [14], [15]. These models try to measure the
capacity of spreading a piece of information in
the network for a user. Most of these models
focus on the topological properties of a node to
estimate the information spreading capability of
a node. But, none of these methods measure the
visibility of a node from the perspective of privacy
preservation. Some machine learning based models
have been proposed in [16],[17],[18] that used
various user and tweet parameters to predict if a
tweet will be retweeted or not. Authors in [16] gave
a model to predict the number of re-tweet in a time
interval, but they focused on the PageRank and
user influence to predict a tweet cascade. In [19]
authors used objects attached with tweets to predict
tweet visibility. Rathore et. al. [20] proposed a
mechanism for predicting the visibility of a user
based on topological parameters of the OSN graph.
But, none of these methods used user’s behavioral
parameters to measure the visibility of a tweet.
III. P ROPOSED MODEL FOR M EASURING
TWEET P UBLICITY ON T WITTER
To predict the visibility of a tweet, we propose
to use users interest in the topic of a tweet and the
trust in the source of the tweet, in addition to users
degree. Following observations are the basis of our
proposal:
1) The followers of a user often forward
those contents whose topic matches with
their interest. We believe that the contents
matching with a user’s interest have a
 higher probability of being forwarded by
the user. Hence, based on the keywords
from previously forwarded tweets, we in-
fer interest of a user. These keywords
may allow us to develop a measure of a
user’s interest, which in turn provide the
probability of forwarding a tweet further.
2) Moreover, the strength of the relationship
between the source user (one who gener-
ates the tweet) and the forwarding user
(one who forwards/shares it further) also
affects the forwarding decision.

A. The System Model

An OSN is portrayed by a directed graph
G = (V, E) where V the set of nodes characterizes
either a user or a tweet. Let T = {t1 , t2 , ...., tk }
be the finite set of all the topics, the twitter users
tweets upon. Each user v ∈ V has interest in at
Fig. 1: Twitter Network Graph
least one topic t ∈ T . E is the set of directed
edges, where each edge represents an association
between two nodes. The edges in E may be of
two types: 1) edge between two users 2) edge the tweet would be very low, and hence may be
between a user and a tweet. Edge (u1 , u2 ), s.t. ignored.
u1 , u2 ∈ V , represents that u1 follows u2 . Edge
(tw1 , u1 ) represents that tweet tw1 is available to A user u ∈ S may increase the visibility of a
u1 . On the other hand, edge (u1 , tw1 ) indicates tweet tw by forwarding it further with probability
that tweet is generated by user u1 . The Figure- αut (tw), where t ∈ T is the topic, that tw is
1, shows a small twitter network with two type of associated with. The probability, αut (tw) is called
nodes, one representing user and other representing forwarding probability of u for tw. For u and tw,
their shared objects (like tweet). A directed edge the probability αut (tw) will be higher, if t matches
from a user to a tweet represents that the user with the interest of u. Moreover, this probability
has generated that tweet, and its reverse edge (i.e., also depends on the nature of the relationship
directed edge from the tweet to the user) represents between tweet owner and the forwarding user. A
that the tweet is available to the user. higher value of forwarding probability would result
in higher visibility of a tweet.
1) Diffusion of a Tweet: The Figure-2 shows
our proposed model which is inspired by Epidemic
models proposed in [5], [6]. We refer those users α
S I
that are likely to forward a tweet further as Sus-
ceptible nodes4 and denote the set of such users
by S. Users to whom a tweet is visible are likely 1 − α

to forward it further. Here, it is important to note D

that, we only consider followers as susceptible

users as they can see the tweet on their home
timeline. The reason behind this assumption is
that the probability of a non-follower, visiting the
home timeline of the source user, for forwarding
4 We use terms user and node inter-changeably.
Fig. 2: Proposed Model
We assume that each tweet is associated with
a topic reflected by a set of keywords. The topic
indicates the subject of the idea communicated by
a tweet. We further assume that each user has

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 interest in at least one topic t ∈ T with non-zero
probability and only forwards messages belonging
to the topics of her/his interest.
As soon as a user u ∈ V , publishes a tweet tw
on topic t, it becomes available to all the followers
of u. As a result of that, followers of u become
susceptible to forward tw further. Any of these
followers may forward tw further depending on
her/ his interest and influence of u on him/her. For
simplicity, we assume that a tweet is forwarded by
any user at most once. Once a follower forwards
tw, s/he increases the visibility of tw. Let αt be the
average forwarding probability with respect to the
topic t ∈ T associated with tw, for all susceptible
users. The users who have forwarded tw are termed
as influenced users for the topic t and denoted by
the set It . The influenced users make tw available
to their respective followers. As a result of it,
some of their followers also become susceptible to
forward the message further with probability αt .
And some of those followers remain uninterested
about the message with probability β = 1−αt . We
refer them as Deactivated nodes or Neutral nodes
with respect to the topic t and denote the set of
such users as Dt .
Let M be the total number of users in OSN and
there are k followers at one hop distance for a user
on average. Then, there will be k + k 2 followers
up to 2-hop distance, and k + k 2 + k 3 up to hop
3-distance and so on. Furthermore, k, k + αt k 2 ,
k+αt k 2 +αt2 k 3 are the number of susceptible users
for the hop distance 1, 2, 3 respectively. Hence, the
total number of susceptible users for tweet tw up
to hop length h from source user u are given by
following equation:
Sth (u) = k + αt k 2 + αt2 k 3 + αt3 k 4 + .... + αth−1 k h
Xh
= αti−1 k i
i=1
= k[1 + αt k + (αt k)2 + .... + (αt k)h−1 ]
" #
1 − (αt k)h
=k , αt k > 1
1 − αt k
" #
(αt k)h − 1
Sth (u) = k (1)
αt k − 1
Similarly, the number of users up to hop length
h, who have shared tw further (i.e. the influenced
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users), are given by :
Ith (u) = αt Sth (u)
h
X
= αti k i (2)
i=1
Let Mhu be the total number of users up to hop
length h from u, then the number of users who
remain reluctant to the message up to hop length
h, is given by
h
X
Dth (u) = Mhu − Ith (u) (3)
i=1
Moreover, It + Dt = M , where It and Dt be
the total number of infected and deactivated users
respectively for the topic t.
2) Forwarding Probability: Let tw be a tweet
with topic t ∈ T , then the forwarding probability
of tw for user u is proportional to the level of
interest that u has in t, and the relationship strength
of u with the tweet’s forwarder/owner. Let τtu ∈
[0, 1], be the probability of interest u has in topic
of tw shared by her/his friend v, and ruv ∈ [0, 1]
be relationship strength of link (u, v). Then, the
forwarding probability of the tweet tw for user u
is given by
αtu = τtu .ruv (4)
Trust: The forwarding probability of tweet tw of
u, by her/his follower f is also proportional to the
level of trust f has on u. The measurement of trust
between two OSN users is not a trivial task. Some
schemes to measure trust has been proposed in the
literature[21]. Sticking ourself to privacy only, we
give a simple formula to measure trust a user v has
on a user u for a time window ∆ as follows:
Let Zu be the set of tweets of u out of which
m tweets are liked or forwarded by user v. Then
trust that v has on u is given by following formula:
∆ m
ηv,u = (5)
|Zu |
User Interest: Users have different preferences
concerning the topic associated with a tweet. They
like/forward tweets that match their preferences
and ignore tweets that do not match any of their
interests. To find the forwarding probability of a
user, we estimate the probability of interest for a
 predetermined set of topics using supervise learn- to our need to remove any stop word occurring in
ing technique over the set of tweets the user has tw.
shared in the past.
Algorithm 2: Algorithm to extract keywords
We trained Naive Bayes (NB) classifier, Multi-
from a given tweet.
nomial Naive Bayes (MNB) classifier and Linear
SVC for detecting the topics from the set of tweets Data: tw: a tweet
of Twitter users. We chose NB classifier as it Data: st words: a list of stop words.
is one of the popular classifier used in text pro- Result: keywords: A finite multi-set of
cessing [22]. As features, we supplied frequency keywords.
distribution of keywords that we extracted using 1 text = Remove emoji (tw)
Algorithm-2 from the set of tweets of the target . Removes emojis and similar
user. We used Algorithm-1 to prepare frequency symbols
distribution of the keywords extracted from tweets 2 text = clean text (text)
of the user. We chose the value of frequency thresh- . Removes all urls, image etc.
old as 6, since it gave us maximum classification 3 noun phrase = np extractor (text)
accuracy during the experiment. 4 for each np in noun phrase do
5 w = split(np)
6 words.append (w);
Algorithm 1: This Algorithm generates fre-
7 for each w in words do
quency distribution of keywords from a given
multi-set of keywords. 8 if w ∈ st words then
9 words.remove (w);
Data: K: A multi-set of keywords
Data: µ: frequency threshold 10 for each w in words do
Result: F : A set of tuples (k, f ), where k, 11 w = spell correct (w);
f are keyword its frequency of
12 for each w in words do
occurrence.
13 w = lammatize(w);
1 F = {} . An empty dictionary
14 keywords.append (w)
2 for each k ∈ K do
. count occurrences for k 15 return(keywords);
3 if k ∈ F then
4 F[k] = F[k] + 1
5 else
IV. I MPLEMENTATION & E VALUATION
6 F[k] = 1
To evaluate the proposed model, we sampled
7 for each k ∈ F do a subgraph of Twitter using BFS Sampling. We
8 if F[k] < µ then chose BFS Sampling because it is one of the
9 remove(F[k]) popular methods to get a plausible sample graph
10 return (F) of OSN[24].

Feature Extraction: To find user interest in
chosen topics, we exploited keywords extracted
from the set of tweets of a user u. We used
Algorithm-2 that extracts keywords from tw, by
employing some of the Natural Language Process-
ing functions available in NLTK library [23]. This
algorithm takes a tweet tw, and a set of Stop-words
as arguments and returns a list of keywords that
occur in tw. We used a list of stop words fitting
A. DataSet
The dataset we used for our experiment purpose
consists of 100176 twitter users with their fol-
lower information and recent tweets. The Figure-3,
shows the out-degree distribution of our sampled
Twitter graph which indicates that around 99, 000
of the users has followers (out-degree) less than
100. Further, we took a Twitter account as the
source for BFS sampling algorithm. As most of
the popular accounts on Twitter has a large number

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 TABLE I: Classification Metrics
Metrics Topic NB MN-NB Linear SVC
Average Accuracy (%) 57.256 95.692 76.077
Accuracy
Variance in Accuracy 220.170 17.059 188.020
Statistics
Std Dev in Accuracy 14.838 4.130 13.712
Film & Music 0.428 0.470 0.417
Politics & Governance 0.820 0.864 0.838
Precision Science & Technology 0.806 0.938 0.852
Sports 0.843 0.925 0.891
Tourism 0.696 0.782 0.778
Film & Music 0.891 0.944 0.944
Politics & Governance 0.684 0.981 0.988
Recall Science & Technology 0.426 0.981 0.995
Sports 0.637 0.963 0.963
Tourism 0.488 0.980 0.980
Film & Music 0.512 0.560 0.524
Politics & Governance 0.691 0.899 0.886
F-Score Science & Technology 0.528 0.948 0.907
Sports 0.657 0.917 0.899
Fig. 3: Out-degree Distribution in the graph. Tourism 0.483 0.840 0.838

example @nature, @ScienceChannel for Science

of followers and if we go to retrieve all of the
followers, then it might result in a graph that would
have a large number of nodes. Therefore, to get
only a reasonable size sample graph, we restricted
our sampling algorithms to retrieve at most 500
followers for a user.
Moreover, we retrieved 32005 recent tweet
of these Twitter users with favorite and retweet
counts. To extract the above-mentioned informa-
tion from Twitter, we wrote a script using Python
2.7.12[25] employing tweepy API [26] to extract
tweets of users with their friends and followers.
The tweepy library is a Python library to com-
municate with Twitter’s REST API[27]. We also
retrieved short description of user from her/his pro-
file that also gives information about user’s interest.
The dataset was stored in MySQL Server version:
5.7.18-0ubuntu0.16.10.1 (Ubuntu), database. Fur-
ther, tweets of all the users were stored in separate
csv files. We performed all of these operations in-
cluding the experiment on a machine having Intel-
i3 processor with 4GB RAM and 64-bit Ubuntu
16.10 Operating System.
B. Training & testing the classifier
In order to get the training and testing data,
we took five topics of interest for our experiment
that include topics Politics & Governance, Film &
Music, Sports, Tourism and Science & Technology.
We identified some Twitter accounts that were
dedicated to exactly one of the above topics. For
5 As at present, Twitter allows one to retrieve at most 3200
recent tweets of a user.
& Technology, @politico, @BBCPolitics, @my-
govindia for Politics & Governance. Each of these
accounts was having the majority of tweets belong-
ing to only one of the chosen topics. We identified
100 such user accounts in total (20 per topic)
and manually annotated them with the respective
topics. We extracted the frequency distribution for
all the keywords appeared in the tweet sets of
these account. This distribution was fed with their
respective topic label to chosen classifier model
instances for training. We used 70% of the data for
training and 30% testing. Our training and testing
sets were disjoint. We also measured Precision,
Recall and F-measure for different topic categories
for all the classifier models. The results are shown
by Table-I.
To estimate the skill of our trained models,
we randomly divided the dataset into the training
set, and test set using the ratio of 70% and 30%
and performed the training and test experiments 50
times and recorded the average values of various
parameters as shown in Table-I . From the Table-I,
we can observe that the MNB classifier achieves
the highest average accuracy of 95% with mini-
mum variance in the accuracy in comparison to
the rest of the two models.
V. R ESULTS AND D ISCUSSION
To evaluate our model, first, we retrieved inter-
est of all the twitter users using MNB Classifier,
we trained earlier. The output of the classifier gives
the probability distribution for the user for the
chosen topics. During the evaluation of our model,

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 we made predictions for different users for hop
count value ranging from 2 to 5 and recorded the
results of predictions. We divided users into two
categories: non-celebrity and celebrity. We refer
users having follower count less than 300 as non-
celebrity users and rest as celebrity users. We
made predictions for 100 randomly selected tweets
belonging to both categories of users that were
also selected randomly. After that, we matched the
predicted values with, the actual number of likes
(favorite count) plus re-tweets count each tweet has
got. Here, we refer this value as publicity/visibility
value. After that, we calculated the prediction error
(in %) by subtracting the predicted value from
the actual publicity value and averaged all of the Fig. 5: Error rate vs Hop-Count in tweet publicity
results. Since during predictions, our model made prediction for Celebrity users
some over-predictions as well, hence we calculated
root mean square error for these predictions and
plots them against hop count. Figure-Figure-4 and
5 show these results. These results confirm that follower’s interest in
the topic of a tweet, trust and local topological
parameters like out-degree impacts the visibility of
a tweet. Therefore, if we can hide a tweet from
the followers having the higher interest in the topic
of the tweet or high trust on the forwarding user
or both, then the visibility of a tweet might be
controlled. Similarly, we can keep the visibility of
a tweet low by hiding it from a follower with high
out-degree or higher interest in the topic of the
tweet.

VI. C ONCLUSION & F UTURE W ORK

Fig. 4: Error rate vs Hop-Count in tweet publicity
prediction for Non-Celebrity users
From the Figure-4, we can observe that our
proposed model gives the maximum accuracy of
approximately 89% if we take hop count value
as 4 for a non-celebrity user. But for hop count
5, it starts making over-prediction and error rate
becomes more than 80%. On the other hand,
Figure-5, shows that for celebrity users, our model
achieves the maximum accuracy of only 38%. We
believe that this is because our dataset has at most
500 followers of such users.
In this paper, we proposed an Epidemic based
model to predict the publicity of a tweet using
user interest and trust between the user and their
followers. Results of the evaluation show that our
model achieves a fair prediction with hop length
4 for non-celebrity users. Our results also show
that the MNB classifier works well with small text
like tweets. In the future, we will explore more
sophisticated features like bigrams and trigrams
in a tweet that might improve the accuracy of
our predictions further. Moreover, we shall work
to exploit the trust and forwarding probability of
followers to control the visibility of tweets.
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