Abstract

Twitter is one of the most important social network, where extracting useful information is of paramount importance to many application areas. Many works to date have tried to mine this information by taking the network structure, language itself or even by searching for a pattern in the words employed by the users. Anyway, a simple idea that might be useful for every challenging mining task - and that at out knowledge has not been tackled yet - consists of predicting the amount of messages (stream volume) that will be emitted in some specific time span. In this work, by using almost 180k messages collected in a period of one week, a preliminary analysis of the temporal structure of the stream volume in Twitter is made. The expected contribution consists of a model based on artificial neural networks to predict the amount of posts in a specific time window, which regards the past history and the daily behavior of the network in terms of the emission rate of the message stream.