Modeling Emotion Influence in Image Social Networks

We study emotion influence in large image social networks. We focus on users´ emotions reflected by images that they have uploaded and social influence that plays a role in changing users´ emotions. We first verify the existence of emotion influence in the image networks, and then propose a probabilistic factor graph based emotion influence model to answer the questions of “who influences whom”. Employing a real network from Flickr as the basis in our empirical study, we evaluate the effectiveness of different factors in the proposed model with in-depth data analysis. The learned influence is fundamental for social network analysis and can be applied to many applications. We consider using the influence to help predict users´ emotions and our experiments can significantly improve the prediction accuracy (3.0-26.2 percent) over several alternative methods such as Naive Bayesian, SVM (Support Vector Machine) or traditional Graph Model. We further examine the behavior of the emotion influence model, and find that more social interactions correlate with higher emotion influence between two users, and the influence of negative emotions is stronger than positive ones.