Anticipatory Intelligence

Anticipatory intelligence has been defined as the ability to "sense, anticipate, and warn of emerging conditions, trends, threats, and opportunities that may require a rapid shift in national security posture, priorities, or emphasis." More generally, it has been characterized as "the science of predicting unpredictable events." As such, anticipatory intelligence is a decision-theoretic discipline in which decisions that may require the aforementioned shifts in policy or response are informed by rapid creation of indicators and warnings of emerging conditions and trends, and an assessment of their likelihood.

This definition of anticipatory intelligence (which refers to emerging conditions and trends) implicitly assumes that patterns in current and historical data can be identified that may anticipate important and rapidly evolving events of national security interest.

Anticipatory intelligence can encompass a number of approaches that serve to meet its objectives, including the field of predictive analytics, which is defined as "the practice of extracting information from existing data sets in order to determine patterns and predict future outcomes and trends." Predictive analytics encompasses a wide variety of statistical techniques—from simple time-series analysis to data mining and machine learning—that may operate on current and historical data, and whose objective is the creation of models that make predictions that can inform decisions.

Use of predictive analytic methods can be applied to many sources of data; however, application of such methods to financial data (both structured and unstructured) for purposes of anticipatory intelligence is a relatively new discipline.

We consider the global capital markets to be a large-scale prediction market continuously updating consensus opinion of informed market participants—albeit one in which the answers to specific questions are more difficult to infer. Using the methods of predictive analytics, real-time streams of market prices and news can therefore be effectively mined in order to infer the existence of hidden or privileged information not yet revealed.

So, predictive analytic models using such data can generate timely and orthogonal sources of warnings, as well as enhanced situational awareness and sensemaking support for analysts.

Principals of Omnis are the inventors of Market Intelligence (MARKINT): a relatively new "INT" that focuses on such applications. MARKINT is defined as "the systematic collection and analysis of information from capital and commodities markets for the purpose of deriving actionable intelligence on the knowledge and intentions of market participants."

More information about MARKINT can be found here.