We study the relationship between social media output and National Football League (NFL) games, using a dataset containing messages from Twitter and NFL game statistics. Specifically, we consider tweets pertaining to specific teams and games in the NFL season and use them alongside statistical game data to build predictive models for future game outcomes (which team will win?) and sports betting outcomes (which team will win with the point spread? will the total points be over under the line?). We experiment with several feature sets and find that simple features using large volumes of tweets can match or exceed the performance of more traditional features that use game statistics.
Recently, Hong and Skiena @cite_13 used sentiment analysis from news and social media to design a successful NFL betting strategy. However, their main evaluation was on in-sample data, rather than forecasting. Also, they only had Twitter data from one season (2009) and therefore did not use it in their primary experiments. We use large quantities of tweets from the 2010--2012 seasons and do so in a genuine forecasting setting for both winner WTS and over under prediction.
@cite_13
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The American Football betting market provides a particularly attractive domain to study the nexus between public sentiment and the wisdom of crowds. In this paper, we present the first substantial study of the relationship between the NFL betting line and public opinion expressed in blogs and microblogs (Twitter). We perform a large-scale study of four distinct text streams: LiveJournal blogs, RSS blog feeds captured by Spinn3r, Twitter, and traditional news media. Our results show interesting disparities between the first and second halves of each season. We present evidence showing usefulness of sentiment on NFL betting. We demonstrate that a strategy betting roughly 30 games per year identified winner roughly 60 of the time from 2006 to 2009, well beyond what is needed to overcome the bookie's typical commission(53 ). In recent years, sentiment analysis in social media has attracted a lot of research interest and has been used for a number of applications. Unfortunately, research has been hindered by the lack of suitable datasets, complicating the comparison between approaches. To address this issue, we have proposed SemEval-2013 Task 2: Sentiment Analysis in Twitter, which included two subtasks: A, an expression-level subtask, and B, a messagelevel subtask. We used crowdsourcing on Amazon Mechanical Turk to label a large Twitter training dataset along with additional test sets of Twitter and SMS messages for both subtasks. All datasets used in the evaluation are released to the research community. The task attracted significant interest and a total of 149 submissions from 44 teams. The bestperforming team achieved an F1 of 88.9 and 69 for subtasks A and B, respectively. We perform a sentiment analysis of all tweets published on the microblogging platform Twitter in the second half of 2008. We use a psychometric instrument to extract six mood states (tension, depression, anger, vigor, fatigue, confusion) from the aggregated Twitter content and compute a six-dimensional mood vector for each day in the timeline. We compare our results to a record of popular events gathered from media and sources. We find that events in the social, political, cultural and economic sphere do have a significant, immediate and highly specific effect on the various dimensions of public mood. We speculate that large scale analyses of mood can provide a solid platform to model collective emotive trends in terms of their predictive value with regards to existing social as well as economic indicators. Twitter, as a social media is a very popular way of expressing opinions and interacting with other people in the online world. When taken in aggregation tweets can provide a reflection of public sentiment towards events. In this paper, we provide a positive or negative sentiment on Twitter posts using a well-known machine learning method for text categorization. In addition, we use manually labeled (positive negative) tweets to build a trained method to accomplish a task. The task is looking for a correlation between twitter sentiment and events that have occurred. The trained model is based on the Bayesian Logistic Regression (BLR) classification method. We used external lexicons to detect subjective or objective tweets, added Unigram and Bigram features and used TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) to filter out the features. Using the FIFA World Cup 2014 as our case study, we used Twitter Streaming API and some of the official world cup hashtags to mine, filter and process tweets, in order to analyze the reflection of public sentiment towards unexpected events. The same approach, can be used as a basis for predicting future events.