Predicting emotional intensity in social networks

Emotions, which are now commonly portrayed in social media, play a fundamental role in decision making. Having this into account, this work proposes a model to predict (forecast) emotions in social networks. This model specifically predicts, for a user, the proportion of comments that will be published with a particular emotion; this proportion is defined as an emotional intensity of the user in a particular time period. On the contrary of other models, which are focused on a single emotion, the proposed model considers a basic scheme of four emotions and employs these in an interdependent manner. The model, moreover, utilizes three types of features: (1) user-related, (2) contact-related, and (3) environment-related. Prediction is performed using linear regression. Nearly 20 models, including ARIMA, are outperformed by the proposed model (with statistically significant results) when evaluated over a dataset extracted from Twitter. Some potential applications include massive opinion monitoring and recommendations to improve the emotional wellness of social media users (for example, the recommendation of joyful memories).