International audienceIn this paper, we analyze a public dataset of electricity consumption collected over 3,800 households for one year and half. We show that some socioeconomic factors are critical indicators to forecast households' daily peak (and total) load. By using a random forests model, we show that the daily load can be predicted accurately at a fine temporal granularity. Differently from many state-of-the-art techniques based on support vector machines, our model allows to derive a set of heuristic rules that are highly interpretable and easy to fuse with human experts domain knowledge. Lastly, we quantify the different importance of each socioeconomic feature in the prediction task

Media marketers and researchers have shown great interestin what becomes a trend within social media sites. Their interests have focused on analyzing the items that become trends, and done so in the context of Youtube, Twitter, and Foursquare. Here we move away from these three platforms and consider a new mobile social-networking application with which users share pictures of "cool" things they find in the real-world. Besides, we shift focus from items to people. Specifically, we focus on those who generate trends (trend makers) and those who spread them (trend spotters). We analyze the complete dataset of user interactions, and characterize trend makers (spotters) by activity, geographical, and demographic features. We find that there are key characteristics that distinguish them from typical users. Also, we provide statistical models that accurately identify who is a trend maker (spotter). These contributions not only expand current studies on trends in social media but also promise to inform the design of recommender systems, and new products.

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