Predicting information cascade popularity is a fundamental problem in social networks. Capturing temporal attributes and cascade role information (e.g., cascade graphs and cascade sequences) is necessary for understanding the information cascade. Current methods rarely focus on unifying this information for popularity predictions, which prevents them from effectively modeling the full properties of cascades to achieve satisfactory prediction performances. In this paper, we propose an explicit Time embedding based Cascade Attention Network (TCAN) as a novel popularity prediction architecture for large-scale information networks. TCAN integrates temporal attributes (i.e., periodicity, linearity, and non-linear scaling) into node features via a general time embedding approach (TE), and then employs a cascade graph attention encoder (CGAT) and a cascade sequence attention encoder (CSAT) to fully learn the representation of cascade graphs and cascade sequences. We use two real-world datasets (i.e., Weibo and APS) with tens of thousands of cascade samples to validate our methods. Experimental results show that TCAN obtains mean logarithm squared errors of 2.007 and 1.201 and running times of 1.76 hours and 0.15 hours on both datasets, respectively. Furthermore, TCAN outperforms other representative baselines by 10.4%, 3.8%, and 10.4% in terms of MSLE, MAE, and R-squared on average while maintaining good interpretability.

基于时间嵌入的级联注意力网络（TCAN）是一个面向大规模信息网络的新型流行度预测架构，通过将时间属性嵌入到节点特征中，并利用级联图注意力编码器（CGAT）和级联序列注意力编码器（CSAT）来完全学习级联图和级联序列的表示，从而实现对信息流的预测。

基於明確時間嵌入的級聯注意網路用於信息流行度預測