The Information Network
Prasanta Bhattacharya, Rishabh Mehrotra · 2016
The Internet has emerged as a leading source of information about the world and its daily occurrences. Platforms like Wikipedia act as information conduits through which informational elements (e.g. topic pages) cater to the information seeking needs of users worldwide. While usage data from these informational elements help us to predict the information seeking behavior of users, especially in reaction to external news events, what has been largely ignored in past literature is the predictive value of the underlying informational network that connects these elements. In this study, we uncover causal linkages in information seeking behavior among related informational elements on Wikipedia. We demonstrate that incorporating this causal information leads to better predictions of page view counts of relevant Wikipedia pages, when compared to models that ignore such underlying causal linkages. We also provide additional evidence about the efficacy of our approach from the real world, by performing a judgment study with human annotators. This research is among the first to investigate and uncover the value of understanding the underlying relationships among informational elements.