[irq]: techie interrupted

At the Interdisciplinary Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks at MIT in November, Associate Professor Devavrat Shah and his student, Stanislav Nikolov, will present a new algorithm that can, with 95 percent accuracy, predict which topics will trend an average of an hour and a half before Twitter’s algorithm puts them on the list — and sometimes as much as four or five hours before.

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In particular, their algorithm compares changes over time in the number of tweets about each new topic to the changes over time of every sample in the training set. Samples whose statistics resemble those of the new topic are given more weight in predicting whether the new topic will trend or not. In effect, Shah explains, each sample “votes” on whether the new topic will trend, but some samples’ votes count more than others’. The weighted votes are then combined, giving a probabilistic estimate of the likelihood that the new topic will trend.