A Survey on Event Prediction Methods from a Systems Perspective: Bringing Together Disparate Research Areas

TL;DR

This survey comprehensively reviews event prediction methods across various research areas from a systems perspective, aiming to unify terminology, assess existing approaches, and identify future challenges.

Contribution

It introduces a systems perspective to integrate and evaluate diverse event prediction methods, facilitating knowledge sharing and guiding future research directions.

Findings

Identified key requirements for effective event prediction systems.

Assessed existing methods against these requirements.

Highlighted open challenges and future research directions.

Abstract

Event prediction is the ability of anticipating future events, i.e., future real-world occurrences, and aims to support the user in deciding on actions that change future events towards a desired state. An event prediction method learns the relation between features of past events and future events. It is applied to newly observed events to predict corresponding future events that are evaluated with respect to the user's desired future state. If the predicted future events do not comply with this state, actions are taken towards achieving desirable future states. Evidently, event prediction is valuable in many application domains such as business and natural disasters. The diversity of application domains results in a diverse range of methods that are scattered across various research areas which, in turn, use different terminology for event prediction methods. Consequently, sharing methods and knowledge for developing future event prediction methods is restricted. To facilitate knowledge sharing on account of a comprehensive integration and assessment of event prediction methods, we take a systems perspective to integrate event prediction methods into a single system, elicit requirements, and assess existing work with respect to the requirements. Based on the assessment, we identify open challenges and discuss future research directions.