Spatio-Temporal Event Forecasting Using Incremental Multi-Source Feature Learning

The forecasting of significant societal events such as civil unrest and economic crisis is an interesting and challenging problem which requires both timeliness, precision, and comprehensiveness. Significant societal events are influenced and indicated jointly by multiple aspects of a society, including its economics, politics, and culture. Traditional forecasting methods based on a single data source find it hard to cover all these aspects comprehensively, thus limiting model performance. Multi-source event forecasting has proven promising but still suffers from several challenges, including (1) geographical hierarchies in multi-source data features, (2) hierarchical missing values, (3) characterization of structured feature sparsity, and (4) difficulty in model’s online update with incomplete multiple sources. This article proposes a novel feature learning model that concurrently addresses all the above challenges. Specifically, given multi-source data from different geographical levels, we design a new forecasting model by characterizing the lower-level features’ dependence on higher-level features. To handle the correlations amidst structured feature sets and deal with missing values among the coupled features, we propose a novel feature learning model based on an N th-order strong hierarchy and fused-overlapping group Lasso. An efficient algorithm is developed to optimize model parameters and ensure global optima. More importantly, to enable the model update in real time, the online learning algorithm is formulated and active set techniques are leveraged to resolve the crucial challenge when new patterns of missing features appear in real time. Extensive experiments on 10 datasets in different domains demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed models.

Psychological Profiling and Event Forecasting Using Computational Language Analysis

Psychologists have long believed that we can discern what makes a person tick by analysing their language. The modern study of language has become a highly sophisticated area of research that leverages computational modelling, objective measures of language, and extensive empirical rigor. The links between a person’s mental processes and the words that they say or write have been extensivelystudied, validated, and applied to fields as diverse as computer science, medicine, sociology, and anthropology, to name just a few. The ability to ‘get inside a person’s head’ by analysing their language patterns from a distance has tremendous appeal and several practical applications, ranging from the patently obvious to the surprisingly nuanced.

Neural network event forecasting for robots with continuous training

Introduction: High hopes for a significant expansion of human capabilities in various fields of activity are pinned on the creation and use of highly intelligent robots. To achieve this level of robot intelligence, it is necessary to successfully solve the problems of predicting the external environment and the state of the robots themselves. Solutions based on recurrent neural networks with controlled elements are promising neural network forecasting systems. Purpose: Search for appropriate neural network structures for predicting events. Development of approaches to controlling the associative call of information from a neural network memory. Methods: Computer simulation of recurrent neural networks with controlled elements and various structures of layers. Results: An improved method of neural network event forecasting with continuous robot training has been developed. This method allows you to predict events on either long or short samples of time series. In order to improve the forecasting accuracy, new rules have been proposed for controlling the associative call of information from the neural network memory. A software system has been developed which implements the proposed method and supports the emulation of neural networks with various layer structures. The possibilities of recurrent neural networks with linear or spiral layer structures are analyzed using the example of urban traffic flow forecasting. The gain of the proposed method in comparison with the ARIMA model for the MAPE indicator is from 4.1 to 7.4%. Among the studied neural network structures, the spiral structures have shown the highest accuracy, and linear structures have shown the lowest accuracy. Practical relevance: The results of the study can be used to improve the accuracy of event forecasting for intelligent robots.