Forecasting the Pulse: How Deviations from Regular Patterns in Online Data Can Identify Offline Phenomena

Abstract

The steady increase of data on human behavior collected online holds significant research potential for social scientists. The purpose of this paper is to add a systematic discussion of different online services, their data generating processes, the offline phenomena connected to these data, and by demonstrating, in a proof of concept, a new approach for the detection of extraordinary offline phenomena by the analysis of online data.