Review

From social data mining to forecasting socio-economic crises

D. Helbing^1,2a and S. Balietti¹

¹ ETH Zurich, CLU, Clausiusstr. 50, 8092 Zurich, Switzerland
² Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA

^a e-mail: dhelbing@ethz.ch

Received: 16 October 2010
Revised: 21 March 2011
Published online: 30 May 2011

Abstract

The purpose of this White Paper of the EU Support Action “Visioneer”(see www.visioneer.ethz.ch) is to address the following goals:

• 1.

  Develop strategies to quickly increase the objective knowledge about social and economic systems.

• 2.

  Describe requirements for efficient large-scale scientific data mining of anonymized social and economic data.

• 3.

  Formulate strategies how to collect stylized facts extracted from large data set.

• 4.

  Sketch ways how to successfully build up centers for computational social science.

• 5.

  Propose plans how to create centers for risk analysis and crisis forecasting.

• 6.

  Elaborate ethical standards regarding the storage, processing, evaluation, and publication of social and economic data.