Predicting Tweet Posting Behavior on Citizen Security: A Hawkes Point Process Analysis

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel Hawkes point process model to predict citizen security perceptions from social media data, incorporating external influences to improve real-time monitoring and forecasting of security-related opinions.

Contribution

It introduces an innovative, interpretable model that combines social network content and external factors for predicting security perceptions over short time frames.

Findings

Model achieves competitive predictive performance

Incorporates external factors influencing content reposting

Provides insights into temporal patterns of security perceptions

Abstract

The Perception of Security (PoS) refers to people's opinions about security or insecurity in a place or situation. While surveys have traditionally been the primary means to capture such perceptions, they need to be improved in their ability to offer real-time monitoring or predictive insights into future security perceptions. Recent evidence suggests that social network content can provide complementary insights into quantifying these perceptions. However, the challenge of accurately predicting these perceptions, with the capacity to anticipate them, still needs to be explored. This article introduces an innovative approach to PoS within short time frames using social network data. Our model incorporates external factors that influence the publication and reposting of content related to security perceptions. Our results demonstrate that this proposed model achieves competitive predictive performance and maintains a high degree of interpretability regarding the factors influencing security perceptions. This research contributes to understanding how temporal patterns and external factors impact the anticipation of security perceptions, providing valuable insights for proactive security planning.