Modeling Twitter

We often hear that the Internet is unpredictable, that it’s the “Wild West.” That would seem to be especially true of a social medium such as Twitter . After all, tweets are by definition instant and short-lived. But in a paper I and my co-authors just submitted to the Annals of Applied Statistics, we describe a model we have developed that predicts how popular a tweet is likely to be within just a few minutes of when the “root tweet” is posted. And anyone who wants to can now try