Maths predicts – this time movie success

In a previous post I talked about predictions using maths and Nates Silver‘s book on essentially that topic was one of my favourites books of last year. This next one is a bit of fun – predicting movie success. Film buffs will know William Goldman’s quote about making films “Nobody knows anything” which is taken to mean that no one can predict how a film will do at the box office. However, researchers have some good news. Mestyán, Yasseri and Kertész have published Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data. As you can tell from the title the key is to use online data and activity. Their algorithm gives good predictive power up to a month before the film is released and hence will be of little use to Hollywood producers receiving pitches for new films. Of course, these are early days and even the Oxford Internet Institute news article uses the word predicts in quotes. Nonetheless the authors compare their results to those obtained using Twitter by other researchers and find it better. The paper is freely available and since the maths behind it is accessible to undergraduates it would be great for a student mini-project. (Talking of projects, over the summer I had an undergraduate studying symmetry matching and it has turned out very well so I’ll definitely be writing about that soon.) Photo attribution: Alex Eylar,...

Glassified – Reinventing the ruler?...

The ruler has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Now it has been updated! You can read more (but not much) at Anirudh Sharma’s website, Creative Applications, Gizmag, and...