Predicting history
Predicting history
复制标题
预测历史
DOI:
10.1038/s41562-019-0620-8
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发表时间:
2019
影响因子:
29.9
通讯作者:
Watts, Duncan J.
中科院分区:
文献类型:
--
作者:
Risi, Joseph;Sharma, Amit;Shah, Rohan;Connelly, Matthew;Watts, Duncan J.
Can events be accurately described as historic at the time they are happening? Claims of this sort are in effect predictions about the evaluations of future historians; that is, that they will regard the events in question as significant. Here we provide empirical evidence in support of earlier philosophical arguments that such claims are likely to be spurious and that, conversely, many events that will one day be viewed as historic attract little attention at the time. We introduce a conceptual and methodological framework for applying machine learning prediction models to large corpora of digitized historical archives. We find that although such models can correctly identify some historically important documents, they tend to overpredict historical significance while also failing to identify many documents that will later be deemed important, where both types of error increase monotonically with the number of documents under consideration. On balance, we conclude that historical significance is extremely difficult to predict, consistent with other recent work on intrinsic limits to predictability in complex social systems,. However, the results also indicate the feasibility of developing ‘artificial archivists’ to identify potentially historic documents in very large digital corpora.
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DOI:
--
发表时间:
1966
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
R. Montague
通讯作者:
R. Montague
DOI:
10.1073/pnas.0307752101
发表时间:
2004-04-06
影响因子:
11.1
作者:
Griffiths, TL;Steyvers, M
通讯作者:
Steyvers, M
DOI:
10.1073/pnas.1717729115
发表时间:
2018-05-01
影响因子:
11.1
作者:
Barron ATJ;Huang J;Spang RL;DeDeo S
通讯作者:
DeDeo S
影响因子:
4.4
作者:
D. Watts
通讯作者:
D. Watts
DOI:
--
发表时间:
2017
期刊:
影响因子:
--
作者:
Sandra González
通讯作者:
Sandra González