Detecting emerging topics and trends via predictive analysis of ‘meme’ dynamics

Discovering and characterizing emerging topics and trends through analysis of Web data is of great interest to security analysts and policy makers. This paper considers the problem of monitoring social media to spot emerging memes - distinctive phrases which act as “tracers” for discrete cultural units - as a means of rapidly detecting new topics and trends. We have recently developed a method for predicting which memes will propagate widely and which will not, thereby enabling the discovery of significant topics. Here we demonstrate the efficacy of this approach through case studies involving political memes and memes associated with an emerging cyber threat.