Researchers have developed a method to “to predict the popularity dynamics of individual items within a complex evolving system.” The results offer illuminations on the functioning of the attention ecomony, social media trends, and everything ” from marketing and traffic control to policy making and risk management.” In contrast to other studies, this model offers a “capability of modeling the arrival process of popularity and [a] remarkable power at predicting the popularity of individual items.”

See the full list of authors and read their research paper, “Modeling and Predicting Popularity Dynamics via Reinforced Poisson Processes,” at ArXiv.