Friday, November 2, 2012

Reverse-engineered Twitter algorithm can predict trending topics before they happen

twitter trending topics

Researchers at MIT say they've found an algorithm that can tell what's going to be trending on Twitter hours before it happens, opening the door to modeling other kinds of data. Twitter's trending topics — the ones shown on its home page — are selected automatically, based on total number of tweets and a jump in how often a topic is mentioned. But Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and student Stanislav Nikolov say that by building a statistical model based on a sample set of 400 topics, they can tell with 95 percent accuracy whether or not a topic will end up trending. In tests, topics can be predicted an average of an hour and a half before they trend, with some predicted up to four or five hours beforehand.


95 percent accuracy, an...


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via The Verge - All Posts http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/2/3590914/mit-twitter-trending-algorithm

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