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Predictability of Extreme Events in Social Media

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  • José M Miotto
  • Eduardo G Altmann

Abstract

It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these extreme events are. We propose a method that, given some information on the items, quantifies the predictability of events, i.e., the potential of identifying in advance the most successful items. Applying this method to different data, ranging from views in YouTube videos to posts in Usenet discussion groups, we invariantly find that the predictability increases for the most extreme events. This indicates that, despite the inherently stochastic collective dynamics of users, efficient prediction is possible for the most successful items.

Suggested Citation

  • José M Miotto & Eduardo G Altmann, 2014. "Predictability of Extreme Events in Social Media," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 9(11), pages 1-7, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0111506
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0111506
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Michael J. Stringer & Marta Sales‐Pardo & Luís A. Nunes Amaral, 2010. "Statistical validation of a global model for the distribution of the ultimate number of citations accrued by papers published in a scientific journal," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(7), pages 1377-1385, July.
    2. Michael J. Stringer & Marta Sales-Pardo & Luís A. Nunes Amaral, 2010. "Statistical validation of a global model for the distribution of the ultimate number of citations accrued by papers published in a scientific journal," Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 61(7), pages 1377-1385, July.
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    Cited by:

    1. Zhenpeng Li & Xijin Tang & Zhenjie Hong, 2022. "Collective attention dynamic induced by novelty decay," The European Physical Journal B: Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, Springer;EDP Sciences, vol. 95(8), pages 1-11, August.

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