Role of different factors in predicting movie success

Box-office forecasting based on sentiments of movie reviews and Independent subspace method

Abstract: Box-office forecasting is a challenging but important task for movie distributors in their decision making process. Many previous studies have tried to determine a way to accurately predict the box-office, but the results reported have not been satisfactory for two main reasons: (1) lack of variable diversity and (2) simplicity of forecasting algorithms. Although the importance of word-of-mouth (WOM) has consistently emphasized in past studies, only summarized information, such as volume or valence of user ratings is commonly used. In forecasting algorithms, multiple linear regression is the most popular algorithm because it generates not only predicted values but also variable significances. In this study, new box-office forecasting models are presented to enhance the forecasting accuracy by utilizing review sentiments and employing non-linear machine learning algorithms. Viewer sentiments from review texts are used as input variables in addition to conventional predictors, whereas three machine learning-based algorithms, i.e., classification and regression tree (CART), artificial neural network (ANN), and support vector regression (SVR), are employed to capture non-linear relationship between the box-office and its predictors. In order to provide variable importance for machine learning-based forecasting algorithms, an independent subspace method (ISM) is applied. Forecasting results from six different forecasting periods show that the presented methods can make accurate and robust forecasts.

Twitter Mining for Discovery, Prediction and Causality: Applications and Methodologies

Abstract: Twitter has found substantial use in a number of settings. For example, Twitter played a major role in the 'Arab Spring' and has been adopted by a large number of the Fortune 100. All of these and other events have led to a large database of Twitter tweets that has attracted the attention of a number of companies and researchers through what has become known as 'Twitter mining' also known as 'TwitterMining'. This paper analyses some of the approaches used to gather information and knowledge from Twitter for Twitter mining. In addition, this paper reviews a number of the applications that employ Twitter Mining, investigating Twitter information for prediction, discovery and as an informational basis of causation. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Using Crowd-Source Based Features from Social Media and Conventional Features to Predict the Movies Popularity

Abstract: Predicting the success of movies has been of interest to economists and investors (media and production houses) as well as predictive analysts. A number of attributes such as cast, genre, budget, production house, PG rating affect the popularity of a movie. Social media such as Twitter, YouTube etc. are major platforms where people can share their views about the movies. This paper describes experiments in predictive analysis using machine learning algorithms on both conventional features, collected from movies databases on Web as well as social media features (text comments on YouTube, Tweets). The results demonstrate that the sentiments harnessed from social media and other social media features can predict the success with more accuracy than that of using conventional features. We achieved best value of 77% and 61% using selected social media features for Rating and Income prediction respectively, whereas selected conventional features gave results of 76.2% and 52% respectively. More it was found that the blend of both types of attributes (conventional and those collected from social media) can outperform the existing approaches in this domain.

An inside look into the complexity of box-office revenue prediction in China:

Abstract: In this article, we discuss various elements contributing to exerting influence on box office in China, which are divided into internal and external factors. Since these factors could merely be quantified by online data sources partially or inaccurately, we propose that relativity analysis is more reasonable than precise revenue prediction. Trailer is selected as the combination of movie content and online behavior prior to releasing. Indexes from seven mainstream video websites are retrieved by the designed big data system which is integrated with the Internet of things technology. Correlation coefficients of different time periods are calculated. We apply multiple linear regression with stepwise method in modeling and prove that watching counts of 1 week before releasing on Youku is the barometer of market performance, especially the first week revenues. We also manifest the power of influential users through constructing Sina Weibo acquisition and analysis system.

Predicting IMDb Ratings of Pre-release Movies with Factorization Machines Using Social Media

Abstract: The film industry has always been a very important sector in the global market. Therefore, it is very important to maximize the profit by predicting the movie success before its release. Although several studies have been done in this field, it is still needed to improve the prediction performance and collect more data. This study aims to explore the use of Factorization Machines approach in order to predict movie success by predicting IMDb ratings for newly released movies using social media data and compare it to current studies. Also, a framework has been developed in order to gather the movie data from different sources including social media. Comparison of the Factorization Machines to the current models shows that there are promising results.

Predicting box-office success of motion pictures with neural networks

Abstract: Predicting box-office receipts of a particular motion picture has intrigued many scholars and industry leaders as a difficult and challenging problem. In this study, the use of neural networks in predicting the financial performance of a movie at the box-office before its theatrical release is explored. In our model, the forecasting problem is converted into a classification problem-rather than forecasting the point estimate of box-office receipts, a movie based on its box-office receipts in one of nine categories is classified, ranging from a 'flop' to a 'blockbuster.' Because our model is designed to predict the expected revenue range of a movie before its theatrical release, it can be used as a powerful decision aid by studios, distributors, and exhibitors. Our prediction results is presented using two performance measures: average percent success rate of classifying a movie's success exactly, or within one class of its actual performance. Comparison of our neural network to models proposed in the recent literature as well as other statistical techniques using a 10-fold cross validation methodology shows that the neural networks do a much better job of predicting in this setting.

Early Prediction of Movie Box Office Success Based on Wikipedia Activity Big Data

Abstract: Use of socially generated “big data” to access information about collective states of the minds in human societies has become a new paradigm in the emerging field of computational social science. A natural application of this would be the prediction of the society's reaction to a new product in the sense of popularity and adoption rate. However, bridging the gap between “real time monitoring” and “early predicting” remains a big challenge. Here we report on an endeavor to build a minimalistic predictive model for the financial success of movies based on collective activity data of online users. We show that the popularity of a movie can be predicted much before its release by measuring and analyzing the activity level of editors and viewers of the corresponding entry to the movie in Wikipedia, the well-known online encyclopedia.

Predicting movie grosses: Winners and losers, blockbusters and sleepers

Abstract: (2000). Predicting Movie Grosses: Winners and Losers, Blockbusters and Sleepers. CHANCE: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 15-24.

Web Science 2.0: Identifying Trends through Semantic Social Network Analysis

Abstract: We introduce a novel set of social network analysis based algorithms for mining the Web, blogs, and online forums to identify trends and find the people launching these new trends. These algorithms have been implemented in Condor, a software system for predictive search and analysis of the Web and especially social networks. Algorithms include the temporal computation of network centrality measures, the visualization of social networks as Cybermaps, a semantic process of mining and analyzing large amounts of text based on social network analysis, and sentiment analysis and information filtering methods. The temporal calculation of betweenness of concepts permits to extract and predict long-term trends on the popularity of relevant concepts such as brands, movies, and politicians. We illustrate our approach by qualitatively comparing Web buzz and our Web betweenness for the 2008 US presidential elections, as well as correlating the Web buzz index with share prices.

Blogs as Predictors of Movie Success

Abstract: Analysis of a comprehensive set of features extracted from blogs for prediction of movie sales is presented. We use correlation, clustering and time-series analysis to study which features are best predictors.