Actively Learning to Attract Followers on Twitter

Abstract Twitter, a popular social network, presents great opportunities for on-line machine learning research. However, previous research hasfocused almost entirely on learning from passively collected data. We study the problem of learning to acquire followers throughnormative user behavior, as opposed to the mass following policies applied by many bots. We formalize the problem as a contextualbandit problem, in which we consider retweeting content to be the action chosen and each tweet (content) is accompanied by context.We design reward signals based on the change in followers. The result of our month long experiment with 60 agents suggests that (1)aggregating experience across agents can adversely impact prediction accuracy and (2) the Twitter community’s response to differentactions is non-stationary. Our findings suggest that actively learning on-line can provide deeper insights about how to attract followersthan machine learning over passively collected data alone.Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, On-line Learning, Contextual Bandits, TwitterAcknowledgementsThe research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Unions Seventh