On the Use of Reservoir Computing in Popularity Prediction

Predicting the life cycle and the short-term popularity of a Web object is important for network architecture optimization. In this paper, we attempt to predict the popularity of a Web object given its historical access records using a novel neural network technique, reservoir computing (RC). The traces of popular videos at YouTube for five continuous months are taken as a case study. We compare RC with existing analytical models. Experimental results show that RC, given a 10-day trace composed of daily cumulative views for a video, is able to predict the next-day’s popularity with less than 5% relative square errors (RSEs). It is also demonstrated that RC achieves the best prediction performance among all compared models in longer-term prediction. The advantages and limitations of using RC in popularity prediction are discussed.