An MIT researcher says he has created an algorithm that can identify Twitter trends hours before the service can itself. If the algorithm works as he says, it could help Twitter — and many more companies — make a lot of money.
A researcher at MIT claims to have developed an algorithm that can accurately predict what topics will trend on Twitter. But Twitter being a relatively minor business in the grand scheme of things, the algorithm might end up being more useful elsewhere, predicting stock prices, ticket sales and other dynamically changing quantities.
According to a release from the MIT News Office, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah says his model has been 95 percent accurate during testing and has been predicting trends hours before they appear on Twitter’s list. The algorithm incorporates a new approach to machine learning that compares real-time data with historical data and predicts outcomes based on past events that most closely align with the current situation. So, rather than analyzing a topic’s chances of trending equally against the entire historical corpus of topics, it will assign more weight to topics whose paths followed similar trajectories up the ranks…
View original post 366 more words
#Hashtag - Thoughts on Law, Technology, the Internet, and Social Media 