Cheng_Can Cascades be Predicted?

Can Cascades be Predicted? Justin Cheng Stanford University jcccf@cs.stanford.edu Lada A. Adamic Facebook ladamic@fb.com P. Alex Dow Facebook adow@fb.com Jon Kleinberg Cornell University kleinber@cs.cornell.edu Jure Leskovec Stanford University... More

Can Cascades be Predicted? Justin Cheng Stanford University jcccf@cs.stanford.edu Lada A. Adamic Facebook ladamic@fb.com P. Alex Dow Facebook adow@fb.com Jon Kleinberg Cornell University kleinber@cs.cornell.edu Jure Leskovec Stanford University jure@cs.stanford.edu ABSTRACT On many social networking web sites such as Facebook and Twitter, resharing or reposting functionality allows users to share others’ content with their own friends or followers. As content is reshared from user to user, large cascades of reshares can form. While a growing body of research has focused on analyzing and characterizing such cascades, a recent, parallel line of work has argued that the future trajectory of a cascade may be inherently unpredictable. In this work, we develop a framework for addressing cascade prediction problems. On a large sample of photo reshare cascades on Facebook, we find strong performance in predicting whether a cascade will continue to grow in the future. We find that the relative gr Less