Middle East and North Africa protests predicted on Beansight

[Guillaume Wolf]

In the beginning of the year, the world has been moved in Middle East
and in North Africa. Many protests made the leaders of big countries
like Tunisia and Egypt leave their functions. Let's see how these
protests have been forecasted by a young predictive game called
Beansight.(This is an adaptation from the original post available
here: http://goo.gl/O7XnX)

The first strike in Tunis was too early to be foresighted by Beansight
as the platform opened after the president was ousted. But what about
the other countries? Let’s have a look at the predictions made on
Beansight.

Egypt

Prediction : Hosni Moubarak will have to quit his position as leader
of Egypt.
This prediction was made on January 26th. Moubarak quit on February
11th. You can have look at the evolution of the probability of the
event to occur (100% meaning the community is positive it will happen)
on the prediction page : http://goo.gl/wNy8Z
At the creation of the prediction, our community was quite small, so
it took some time to have a proper trend. The prediction had an almost
100% probability to occur on February 4th. But it slowly decreased
over time as people were doubting Moubarak would eventually quit. On
February 11th, Moubarak quit. It took two days for our community to
adapt their votes.


Libya

Prediction 1: After the Egypt, it will be Libya! http://goo.gl/2KYJT
Quite difficult prediction we have here. It’s not very clear. Does
that mean there will be protests in Libya? Does that mean that the
leader of Libya will be dismissed? I don’t really know. This is the
interesting part of Beansight. As our prediction are checked by the
community through our algorithm, even unclear predictions are
validated.
On this prediction, the trends shows that the crowds estimated from
February 22nd, that the protests in Libya were as important as
protests in Egypt. (On February 21st, the movement spread on the whole
country.)

Prediction 2: Kadhafi will be dead by the end of march because of
protests in Libya. http://goo.gl/6HP6h
This prediction drives a lot of traffic on Beansight. Is Kadhafi dead?
Will he be killed before the end of the month? It didn’t happen.
Here again, it took a few days to have a real trend. We can see that
our community were quite confident it wouldn’t happen from March 3rd.
Then the probability slowly decreased over time to reach 0% on April
1st.

Prediction 3: An external army force will join Libya to get rid of
Kadhafi http://goo.gl/QgwQy
Predicted in the end of February, this prediction became true on March
18th as UN decided to intervene.
We can see that the community was confident in the beginning, then
doubted till mid-March and then anticipated the UN call before it
happened.


Conclusion

All in all, we can see that on these predictions, the community did
predict some of the events that happened during the middle east
protests. Obviously the signal was stronger as deadlines approached.