Enable forecasting for results

Forecasting allows you to anticipate future fluctuations in conversations and engagement for widgets that show results over time (volume, engagement, and reach). When you enable forecasting, Lumen model builds a 90 day forecast for conversations around your search term, and returns projected results for 24-hour intervals.

Lumen’s AI model learns typical patterns in social media data by scanning through millions of historical time series snippets extracted from real data. The forecast involves a "best" value forecast for each day (the dotted line) and a 90% confidence interval for each day (green area).

Lumen uses daily data for all forecasting calculations, and uses the previous full day (full 24 hours) as the last day for input. This means that data for today is also predicted, so the data set used for forecasting is as complete as possible.

Lumen needs a certain amount of historical data on your search term to provide a reliable forecast calculation. The following guidelines show the forecast period you get based on the historical data you have for a topic.

Tip: If your topic has no results for five consecutive days, we recommend you add historical data to ensure a more reliable forecast.

Enable forecasting

You can enable forecasting on Quick Search results or Topic Insights.

1. On the Quick Search results or Topic Insights page, locate the widget for which you want to enable forecasting.
2. Point to the widget, select More, and then select Forecasting.
3. In the Setup Forecasting window, use the Enable forecasting toggle to turn on forecasting, and then select Apply.

   Lumen updates the results widget to show a dotted line that is the likeliest future value. The upper and lower bounds (shaded in green) indicate that 90% of other forecasts (not shown) will fall within this range. If the forecast goes above or below the confidence interval, this means that this value is an outlier with a 10% chance of occurring.
   
   

   Note: If you compare several topics you will not be able to see the confidence intervals but only the forecasts for each given topic.

4. Point to an area on the forecasting line graph to see details about the forecasted results. The pop-up window shows the total number of results predicted for a 24-hour period, with a minimum and maximum confidence rate.
   
   

Disable forecasting

You can disable forecasting on Quick Search results or Topic Insights.

1. Point to the widget, select More, and then select Forecasting.
2. In the Setup Forecasting window, switch the Enable forecasting toggle to turn peak detection off, and then select Apply.