Using Social Media for Global Security

Chapter 6

Understanding and Forecasting Events

Appropriate analytical methodologies can help you understand how security events and issues develop over time and identify the factors that influence the events. Some methodologies can also help you go beyond and manipulate the identified factors to forecast how the event will evolve in the future or whether similar events will take place. Specifically, language and sentiment analysis (LSA), correlation and regression analysis (CRA), and volumetric analysis (VA) can help you use social media and other data to understand and forecast a variety of security events, including famines and illicit behavior. The analyses can help you discover relationships between content on social media and events or actions on the ground, track the evolution of the relationships, and detect emerging security problems. This chapter begins by illustrating how simple monitoring of social media data can help you detect and understand events more quickly than traditional methods. It next defines forecasting, explains how it differs from predicting, and describes what it entails. The chapter ends by explaining how to conduct LSA, CRA, and VA through examples and walkthroughs.

Introduction to Analyzing Events

This chapter provides a few ways you can use formal and some informal methods to analyze security events so you can understand them and forecast their development and emergence in the near future. When we say security events, we also refer to corresponding ...