Modeling on social popularity and achievement: A case study on table tennis

Reputation and fame, two measurements of social popularity, play an increasing important role in the modern society. Reputation is influenced by one’s performance of success, while often divorced from her/his professional achievements. Trying to figure out the relationship between the two measures is crucial for objectively rewarding excellence in all fields, such as entertainment, sports and sciences. Baidu popularity, an index developed by the dominating searching engine company in China, is designed to reflect the reputation of a person in Chinese media and publications. In this paper, Baidu popularity is utilized to quantify the relationship of a person’s social popularity and her/his occupation parameters, such as the career length, the values of tournaments, rankings, etc. Taking table tennis athletes as an example, we quantify the relationship between the success and the Baidu popularity. The data collected from web sites is used to measure the Baidu popularity of athletes. A social popularity model (SPM) is constructed by combining the logarithm of the Baidu popularity and the linear combination of the logarithms of the four observed attributes. Experiments show that the model is effective and robust, and also reveals that performance indicators are the root cause of popularity in many areas of human achievement. The real-world data confirms that the SPM model is a timely and appropriate framework to measure the reputation of table tennis athletes.