Can cascades be predicted

On many social networking web sites such as Facebook and Twit-ter, resharing or reposting functionality allows users to share oth-ers ’ 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 un-predictable. 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 growth of a cascade becomes more predictable as we observe more of its reshares, that temporal and structural features are key predictors of cascade size, and that initially, breadth, rather than depth in a cascade is a better indicator of larger cascades. This prediction performance is robust in the sense that multiple distinct classes of features all achieve similar performance. We also dis-cover that temporal features are predictive of a cascade’s eventual shape. Observing independent cascades of the same content, we find that while these cascades differ greatly in size, we are still able to predict which ends up the largest.