“The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."- Mark Twain Although future events have unique circumstances, they typically follow familiar past patterns. Over the past few years, I devoted my life to the development of prediction techniques based on mining such patterns—inferring the first Cholera outbreak in Cuba in 130 years, genocide events and riots in Sudan. The algorithms I developed deal with the complexity of discovering such patterns by harvesting large-scale digital histories, social and real-time media and human web behavior, and augmenting them with human knowledge mined from the web, to deliver real-time estimations of the likelihood of future events. My recent efforts included applying such methods in order to predict events in the economy, which will be described in this talk.

1. Dr. Kira Radinsky,
Co-founder, CTO

2. Arkansas
Austin
Bird Deaths

3. Fish deaths
Bird deaths
Animal Deaths

4. Fish deaths
Bird deaths
Animal Death
Oil Spill

5. 150 years of news articles
Billions of tweets
Millions of web searches

6. Event1
Merchant ship
Collide
Tanker
05/25/2010 11:00
Singapore
Location
Action
Time- frame
Event2
spill
05/25/2010 15:00
Action
Time- frame
Time
“Tanker and merchant ship collide”
“Oil spill off Singapore”
Oil
Location
Singapore

7. Causality Graph

8. 1960
2006
Area total
Ethnic groups
Population density
GDP
Government Type
Percent Water

9. Cuba faces its worst droughtfor 50 years. BBC, April 2011

10. Tropical stormIsaac drenches Haiti, swipes CubaReuters, August 2012

11. After a century without the disease, Cuba fights to contain CholeraNBC, January 2013

12. Cholera mortality rate
World Health Organization (WHO)
Deaths/Year
1
0
0
0
0
1
0
Prompt rehydration therapy
can save lives

14. Combine with Internal Sales Data

15. Simulating the Market
Connecting Macro &Micro Economics

16. Humans and machines market

17. Decision making mechanisms

18. Dr. Kira Radinsky,
Co-founder, CTO