Abstract
Use of socially generated "big data" to access information about collective states of the minds in human societies has become a new paradigm in the emerging field of computational social science. A natural application of this would be the prediction of the society's reaction to a new product in the sense of popularity and adoption rate. However, bridging the gap between "real time monitoring" and "early predicting" remains a big challenge. Here we report on an endeavor to build a minimalistic predictive model for the financial success of movies based on collective activity data of online users. We show that the popularity of a movie can be predicted much before its release by measuring and analyzing the activity level of editors and viewers of the corresponding entry to the movie in Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia.
Original language | English |
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Article number | e71226 |
Journal | PLoS ONE |
Volume | 8 |
Issue number | 8 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 21 Aug 2013 |
Externally published | Yes |