A layer-wise deep stacking model for social image popularity prediction

In this paper, we present a Layer-wise Deep Stacking (LDS) model to predict the popularity of Flickr-like social posts. LDS stacks multiple regression models in multiple layers, which enables the different models to complement and reinforce each other. To avoid overfitting, a dropout module is introduced to randomly activate the data being fed into the regression models in each layer. In particular, a detector is devised to determine the depth of LDS automatically by monitoring the performance of the features achieved by the LDS layers. Extensive experiments conducted on a public dataset consisting of 432K Flickr image posts manifest the effectiveness and significance of the LDS model and its components. LDS achieves competitive performance on multiple metrics: Spearman’s Rho: 83.50%, MAE: 1.038, and MSE: 2.011, outperforming state-of-the-art approaches for social image popularity prediction.