Identification of Potential Collective Actions Using Enhanced Gray System Theory on Social Media

A collective action that considerably affects government management and public security, e.g., a mass demonstration, usually experiences a long development period, originating from small and uncertain variations called weak signals on social media. Researchers generally identify collective action by small changes in communication frequency, emerging key words, and sentiment. However, most studies only consider the present environment, which may not evolve into a collective action, or conduct a short-term prediction in which significant damage is already done when the collective action is identified. This paper proposes a predictive framework to identify potential collective actions, considering the future evolution as well as the present situation, and providing a reference for early decision making. In the framework, a future sign to describe events is improved and the enhanced gray system theory is used to predict the evolution of a future sign. Mentions of events surrounding the Arab Spring-using over 300000 different open-content Web sources crawled from social media in seven different languages-are analyzed, which suggests that the predictive framework can more precisely identify the weak signals of collective actions.