Box-Cox transformation as an alternative method for modeling video-on-demand popularity

Abstract

The popularity of multimedia videos related to a wide range of news, which were emitted in three different Spanish local on-line newspapers, has been researched in this paper. The statistic distribution from which the popularity came from is unknown. In fact, throughout the literature, many papers have modeled popularity with different distributions, such as Mandelbrot, Stretched, Zipf-like and so on. In this paper, the Box-Cox transformation has been proposed as a unified approach that would cover all the former distributions. The main advantage is its non-parametric nature and in consequence the model selection might be avoided.