Inproceedings,

'Beating the News' with EMBERS: Forecasting Civil Unrest Using Open Source Indicators

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .
Proceedings of the 20th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, page 1799--1808. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2014)
DOI: 10.1145/2623330.2623373

Abstract

We describe the design, implementation, and evaluation of EMBERS, an automated, 24x7 continuous system for fore- casting civil unrest across 10 countries of Latin America using open source indicators such as tweets, news sources, blogs, economic indicators, and other data sources. Un- like retrospective studies, EMBERS has been making fore- casts into the future since Nov 2012 which have been (and continue to be) evaluated by an independent T&E team (MITRE). Of note, EMBERS has successfully forecast the June 2013 protests in Brazil and Feb 2014 violent protests in Venezuela. We outline the system architecture of EMBERS, individual models that leverage specific data sources, and a fusion and suppression engine that supports trading off spe- cific evaluation criteria. EMBERS also provides an audit trail interface that enables the investigation of why specific predictions were made along with the data utilized for fore- casting. Through numerous evaluations, we demonstrate the superiority of EMBERS over baserate methods and its capability to forecast significant societal happenings.

Tags

Users

  • @parangsaraf

Comments and Reviews