Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. Felix Naumann
 

04.05.2011

Black Swan - Discovering events that matter.

As part of a seminar supervised by Prof. Naumann and Johannes Lorey in the last winter term, a group of students examined how statistical outliers relate to certain occurrences in human history. For this, the students applied different information extraction, integration, and mining techniques to augment the statistical data with historical event data. The goal of the Black Swan project is to facilitate better understanding of socioeconomic developments even by non-experts and illustrate more or less surprising correlations. The student team developed a prototype that allows to explore the augmented data. Overall, the application offers information about more than 40,000 events and their impact on 400 statistical time series for 200 different countries.

The results of this project have been accepted as a demo paper at CIKM 2011.

For further information and to try out the demo application, please visit:

http://www.blackswanevents.org