Abstract:
Recent advances in technology have enabled social media services to support
space-time indexed data, and internet users from all over the world have
created a large volume of time-stamped, geo-located data. Such spatiotemporal
data has immense value for increasing situational awareness of local events,
providing insights for investigations and understanding the extent of
incidents, their severity, and consequences, as well as their time-evolving
nature. In analyzing social media data, researchers have mainly focused on
finding temporal trends according to volume-based importance. Hence, a
relatively small volume of relevant messages may easily be obscured by a huge
data set indicating normal situations. In this paper, we present a visual
analytics approach that provides users with scalable and interactive social
media data analysis and visualization including the exploration and
examination of abnormal topics and events within various social media data
sources, such as Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. In order to find and understand
abnormal events, the analyst can first extract major topics from a set of
selected messages and rank them probabilistically using Latent Dirichlet
Allocation. He can then apply seasonal trend decomposition together with
traditional control chart methods to find unusual peaks and outliers within
topic time series. Our case studies show that situational awareness can be
improved by incorporating the anomaly and trend examination techniques into a
highly interactive visual analysis process.