A new study from researchers at Yale, the University of California-San Diego, the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid, and NICTA of Australia, formulated a technique that they claim can forecast social media trends up to two months in advance.
The study, described in a paper titled “Using Friends as Sensors to Detect Global-Scale Contagious Outbreaks” and published in the online journal PLoS One, focused on the role of “sensors,” meaning central individuals with more social connections who act as sentinels for wider networks, registering an emergent trend before it becomes prevalent across the network and the Internet at large. One advantage of the system is it allows researchers to predict trends based on a relatively small sample size using “local monitoring,” rather than trying to wrangle data from the entire social media universe.
Link to the full article
Link to the research article
Article originally published on MediaPost.
No comments:
Post a Comment