MIT researcher says he can predict Twitter trends

MIT Associate Professor David Shah, 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.

Professor David 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 of top trends. And Twitter is certainly interested in the research.