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Friday, September 28, 2018

Analyzing book reading behavior on Goodreads to predict Amazon Bestsellers

From TechXplore:

Researchers at Northwestern University, Microsoft Research India, and the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur have recently developed a model to predict whether a book will become a bestseller on Amazon within 15 days of its publication. Their model, outlined in a study pre-published on arXiv, works by analyzing reading behavior on the online platform Goodreads.

"We have been working on analyzing the popularity dynamics of various social media entities, such as hashtags in Twitter, topics in Quora etc." Animesh Mukherjee, one of the researchers who carried out the study told TechXplore. "We felt that a similar approach could be taken to analyze the popularity of books and we found Goodreads to be ideal for this investigation."

A book's popularity depends on a multitude of factors and can be measured using several parameters. In their study, the researchers focused on how book reading characteristics influence its popularity. They performed a cross-platform analysis of Goodreads entities and tried to link these with the volume of sales for books on Amazon.

Their model achieved a very promising average accuracy of 88.72 percent in predicting books that would become Amazon bestsellers a few weeks after their publication. Their method, which was based on features derived from user posts and genre-related properties, attained an improvement of 16.4 percent compared to baseline methods that only use traditional popularity factors, such as book ratings or reviews.

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