Prediction possible within four hours, with a success rate of 76%
"Launch Hard or Go Home!" is the title of a study by three researchers from the Swiss university EPFL (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne), on the topic of predicting the success of project financing on the popular crowdfunding service, Kickstarter.
According to Vincent Ete, Matthias Grossglauser, and Patrick Thiran, it is possible to predict the success of a Kickstarter project within four hours, with a successful prediction rate (in terms of whether the campaign achieves its goals or not) reaching 76%.
Their paper was presented at the Conference on Online Social Networks and the method the researchers came up with is 8% more accurate than that of an American group, which until now had the lead in the subject.
It is estimated that of all funding programs uploaded to Kickstarter, the percentage of those that do not achieve their goals is 56%.
"As only 44% of programs succeed, it is very important for their creators to know early on the probability of their campaign's success, so that they are ready to react accordingly," the three researchers report.
The main advantage of this method is that it takes into account detailed information about a project's backers, while also monitoring Twitter mentions. These two variables, combined with more "conventional" data, allow for better predictions.
The researchers drew on a nine-month study that looked at nearly 16,000 Kickstarter campaigns. One of the things they found was that successful campaigns were 3.2 times more likely to be mentioned on social media than unsuccessful ones.
Researchers put their theories into practice through the Sidekick tool, which "observes" projects that are in progress on Kickstarter.
Source: naftemporiki.gr
