Correlation and pattern detection in event networks

Events happening at defined moments in time and involving specific entities from a social or physical system can be organized in networks or graphs. The study of such event graphs may reveal causal relations between subsequent events or compound events that we define as “typed events”. Moreover, characteristic sequences of events or patterns can arise in consequence of phenomena affecting the system. Methods to build the event graph and to search for the typed events and their significance are described in detail. An embedding strategy to encode typed events in low dimensional vectors is defined, and both supervised and unsupervised learning is applied to search for meaningful patterns. Experiments have been conducted using data from a real investigation and some synthetic data.