Online News Popularity: Mashable Articles with Social Media Shares

61 attributes summarize features of articles published by Mashable over a two-year period. The dataset, sourced from UCI, aims to predict the number of shares in social networks. It was created by researchers from INESC TEC and Universidade do Minho, with acquisition noted on January 8, 2015.

Use Cases

• Predicting article virality based on content features like word count and keyword metrics.
• Analyzing the relationship between article channel (e.g., Lifestyle, Tech) and social media engagement.
• Benchmarking regression models on a dataset with a mix of categorical and numerical features.
• Studying the impact of multimedia elements (images, videos) on content sharing.

Strengths

• Contains 61 attributes, with 58 explicitly designated as predictive features.
• Data covers a two-year publication period from a specific source (Mashable).
• Includes derived performance metrics estimated by the authors using a Random Forest classifier.

Limitations

• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The original article content is not included, only statistical features derived from it.

Provenance

Source

UCI Machine Learning Repository

Collection Method

Features were summarized from articles published by Mashable.

Time Range

Covers a two-year period (specific years not stated).