Nearcasting forwarding behaviors and information propagation in Chinese Sina-Microblog

As the largest social media in China, the Sina-Microblog plays an important role in public opinion dissemination. Despite intensive efforts in understanding the information propagation dynamics, the use of a simple outbreak model to generate summative indices that can be used to characterize the time series of a single Weibo event has not been attempted. This work fills this gap, and illustrates the potential of using a simple outbreak model in conjunction with the historical data about the cumulative forwarding users for nearcasting the propagation trend.