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posted by janrinok on Sunday October 02 2016, @07:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the we-don't-know-what-we-know dept.

In the age of Big Data, automated systems can track societal events on a global scale. These systems code and collect vast stores of real-time "event data"—happenings gleaned from news articles covering everything from political protests to ecological shifts around the world.

In new research published Thursday in the journal Science, Northeastern network scientist David Lazer and his colleagues analyzed the effectiveness of four global-scale databases and found they are falling short when tested for reliability and validity.

[...] The fully-automated systems studied were the International Crisis Early Warning System, or ICEWS, maintained by Lockheed Martin, and Global Data on Events Language and Tone, or GDELT, developed and run out of Georgetown University. The others were the hand-coded Gold Standard Report, or GSR, generated by the nonprofit MITRE Corp., and the Social, Political, and Economic Event Database, or SPEED, at the University of Illinois, which uses both human and automated coding.

First the researchers tested the systems' reliability: Did they all detect the same protest events in Latin America? The answer was "not very well." ICEWS and GDELT, they found, rarely reported the same protests, and ICEWS and SPEED agreed on just 10.3 percent of them.

Next they assessed the systems' validity: Did the protest events reported actually occur? Here they found that only 21 percent of GDELT's reported events referred to real protests. ICEWS' track record was better, but the system reported the same event more than once, jacking up the protest count.

Vast reams of data are analyzed every millisecond of every day about the stock market, but still nobody can predict which way it will go...


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @02:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 02 2016, @02:22PM (#409072)

    Meaningless. It does however makes me happy and warm inside, that someone would think that way.

    Big Data is filled with false positives, not too hard to manipulate, requires huge amount of hardware connected to communication networks, and very very complex. Meaning full of exploitable holes.

    What revolution? Why would you need to overthrow anyone?

    Why not manipulate? Does it matter who's name is on the door, when machines make all decisions anyway?