Modeling Inter-Country Connection from Geotagged News Reports: A Time-Series Analysis

The development of theories and techniques for big data analytics offers tremendous flexibility for investigating large-scale events and patterns that emerge over space and time. In this research, we utilize a unique open-access dataset "The Global Data on Events, Location and Tone" (GDELT) to model the image of China in mass media, specifically, how China has related to the rest of the world and how this connection has evolved upon time based on an autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) model. The results of this research contribute both in methodological and empirical perspectives: We examined the effectiveness of time series models in predicting trends in long-term mass media data. In addition, we identified various types of connection strength patterns between China and its top 15 related countries. This study generates valuable input to interpret China's diplomatic and regional relations based on mass media data, as well as providing methodological references for investigating international relations in other countries and regions in the big data era.