Predicting Bursts And Popularity Of Hashtags In Real-Time

Hashtags have been widely used to annotate topics in tweets (short posts on Twitter.com). In this paper, we study the problems of real-time prediction of bursting hashtags. Will a hashtag burst in the near future? If it will, how early can we predict it, and how popular will it become? Based on empirical analysis of data collected from Twitter, we propose solutions to these challenging problems. The performance of different features and possible solutions are evaluated.