Can you predict retweets more accurately than an algorithm?

It used a data set of around 11,000 paired tweets — two tweets about the same link sent by the same person — to learn which word patterns looked predictive and then tested whether these patterns hold in new data. This is usually how “smart” algorithms are created from big data: Large data sets with known correct answers serve as a training bed and then new data serves as a test bed — not too differently from how we might learn what our co-workers find funny.