Analyzing Time Series Data

Topics

This week’s assignments will guide you through the following topics:

• Know the essential components of time series analysis
• Analyze time series data on Wikipedia

Reading

Please watch these short Youtube videos:

• Introducing Time Series Analysis and forecasting
• Interrupted Time Series
• Difference-in-Differences

Please read these two papers:

• Jennifer Pan and Margaret E. Roberts. “Censorship’s Effect on Incidental Exposure to Information: Evidence From Wikipedia” [Link]
• Brian C. Keegan and Chenhao Tan. “A Quantitative Portrait of Wikipedia’s High-Tempo Collaborations during the 2020 Coronavirus Pandemic” [Link]
  • It’s a bit long but demonstrates the many uses of several Wikipedia data

If you have time and interested in real-world applications:

• Forecasting at Scale: How and Why We Developed Prophet for Forecasting at Facebook

Tasks

Complete the following tasks:

• Continue to compute/optimize the M-Statistic for all English Wikipedia Articles.
• Plot time series of edit history of some highly-edited pages.
  • Do you notice some patterns?
  • Do the patterns differ between human vs. bot edits?
• Think about and describe some potential ways you can quantify the effect of bot policies on the quality of collaboration on Wikipedia using concepts from the readings.

Weekly Questions

Answer the standard participation questions