Role of Artificial Intelligence and/or Social Media Data in Forecasting Techniques

Artificial intelligence is a function of has become a complementary and an almost a must have for businesses. Data acquisition has become better and the need to transform data such data into useful forms is there. Through research, it has been established that people to a large extent do not rely on careful assessment of evidence when making decisions, but rather they rely on biased mental heuristics as explained by Deloitte (2016).  Determining these mental heuristics is the challenge that needs to be designed, structured and finally executed. This need forms the intersection between social media, artificial intelligence and forecasting techniques. 

When visualized as a system, social media, artificial intelligence, and forecasting techniques can be viewed as a system or a rudimentary factory complete with inputs, processing and outputs. Social media provides the data that is necessary in determining mental heuristics that drive choices for people. Artificial intelligence in this case is the actual factory of processor of the data provided by social media. To complete the cycle, forecasting techniques provide the methods that artificial intelligence use to process information and convert it to usable forms. Social media is then used to point out to the consumers what they might be interested in. 

In conclusion, artificial intelligence is what helps to improve user experience on social media sites. Artificial intelligence utilizes forecasting techniques that help in analyzing and sorting large databases that are created from data input and collected by social media sites (Asur & Huberman 2010). Social media features, for instance, suggestions, newsfeeds, trending topics, and friend suggestions all happen automatically thanks to artificial intelligence. Due to huge sizes of information that is generated from the more than a billion Facebook users for instance, artificial intelligence is the only option that can be used to make sense out of such a database. 

References

Deloitte. (2016, July 26). Minds and machines: The art of forecasting in the age of artificial intelligence. Retrieved from Deloitte Website: https://www2.deloitte.com/insights/us/en/deloitte-review/issue-19/art-of-forecasting-human-in-the-loop-machine-learning.html

Asur, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2010, August). Predicting the future with social media. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology-Volume 01 (pp. 492-499). IEEE Computer Society.