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 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 discover 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.

该研究讨论在社交媒体平台上，用户分享他人的内容可能会通过 resharing 或 reposting 功能形成大规模的 cascade，而未来 cascade 的轨迹本质上是不可预测的，但通过观察其 reshares 数量，结构和时间特征等因素，可以有效预测其继续扩大的概率，同时 initally 时的 breath 水平也是较大 cascade 的较好指标。