Mike Perham

On Ruby, software and the Internet

Stream Processing and “Trending” Data

May 5th, 2010 · 1 Comment

The Britney Spears Problem is a fantastic article from American Scientist about real-time processing of streaming data to determine trends. I love discovering clever new algorithms and the “majority algorithm” is simple, easy to implement but something you probably wouldn’t think up yourself if solving the same problem. If you’ve ever wondered how Twitter’s trending feature is implemented, this is probably a good place to start.

Tags: Software

1 response so far ↓

  • 1 mat kelcey // Jul 14, 2010 at 12:56 am

    i loved that american scientist article too.

    i’ve found that a simple variance check is probably the best way to detect trends.

    see http://bit.ly/9H9TNy

    ps. thanks for your preso on eventmachine, in finally “get” fibers :P

    mat

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