Entropy, Vol. 21, Pages 57: BBS Posts Time Series Analysis based on Sample Entropy and Deep Neural Networks (Entropy)

The modeling and forecasting of BBS (Bulletin Board System) posts time series is crucial for government agencies, corporations and website operators to monitor public opinion. Accurate prediction of the number of BBS posts will assist government agencies or corporations in making timely decisions and estimating the future number of BBS posts will help website operators to allocate resources to deal with the possible hot events pressure. By combining sample entropy (SampEn) and deep neural networks (DNN), an approach (SampEn-DNN) is proposed for BBS posts time series modeling and forecasting. The main idea of SampEn-DNN is to utilize SampEn to decide the input vectors of DNN with smallest complexity, and DNN to enhance the prediction performance of time series. Selecting Tianya Zatan new posts as the data source, the performances of SampEn-DNN were compared with auto-regressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), seasonal ARIMA, polynomial regression, neural networks, etc. approaches for prediction of the daily number of new posts. From the experimental results, it can be found that the proposed approach SampEn-DNN outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches for BBS posts time series modeling and forecasting.