Information extracted from social media streams has been leveraged to forecast the outcome of a large number of real-world events, from political elections to stock market fluctuations. An increasing amount of studies demonstrates how the analysis of social media conversations provides cheap access to the wisdom of the crowd. However, extents and contexts in which such forecasting power can be effectively leveraged are still unverified at least in a systematic way. It is also unclear how social-media-based predictions compare to those based on alternative information sources. To address these issues, here we develop a machine learning framework that leverages social media streams to automatically identify and predict the outcomes of soccer matches. We focus in particular on matches in which at least one of the possible outcomes is deemed as highly unlikely by professional bookmakers. We argue that sport events offer a systematic approach for testing the predictive power of social media conversations, and allow to compare such power against the rigorous baselines set by external sources. Despite such strict baselines, our framework yields above 8 marginal profit when used to inform simple betting strategies. The system is based on real-time sentiment analysis and exploits data collected immediately before the game start, allowing for bets informed by its predictions. We first discuss the rationale behind our approach, then describe the learning framework, its prediction performance and the return it provides as compared to a set of betting strategies. To test our framework we use both historical Twitter data from the 2014 FIFA World Cup games (10 sample), and real-time Twitter data (full stream) collected by monitoring the conversations about all soccer matches of the four major European tournaments (FA Premier League, Serie A, La Liga, and Bundesliga), and the 2014 UEFA Champions League, during the period between October, 25th 2014 and November, 26th 2014.
To prove the idea that social media data convey predictive power, Asur and Huberman @cite_3 designed a system that uses Twitter to forecast the box-office revenues of upcoming movies: simple signals such as the buzz around a given movie seem indicative of its future popularity. DiGrazia et al @cite_18 used a similar framework to show that there exists a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a political candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. Bermingham and Smeaton @cite_2 illustrated a similar case study for the recent Irish General Election, modeling political sentiment by mining social media conversations. They combined sentiment analysis using supervised learning and volume-based measures and found that this signals are highly predictive of election results. Bollen et al @cite_6 analyzed the textual content of the daily Twitter stream to show that Twitter mood is predictive of the daily fluctuations in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA). Xue Zhang et al @cite_24 collected Twitter data for six months and found that the percentage of emotional tweets significantly negatively correlates with Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S &P 500 fluctuations, but displays a significant positive correlation to VIX.
@cite_18 @cite_6 @cite_3 @cite_24 @cite_2
1976267568 2171468534 2015186536 2037625889 137217113
Is social media a valid indicator of political behavior? There is considerable debate about the validity of data extracted from social media for studying offline behavior. To address this issue, we show that there is a statistically significant association between tweets that mention a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives and his or her subsequent electoral performance. We demonstrate this result with an analysis of 542,969 tweets mentioning candidates selected from a random sample of 3,570,054,618, as well as Federal Election Commission data from 795 competitive races in the 2010 and 2012 U.S. congressional elections. This finding persists even when controlling for incumbency, district partisanship, media coverage of the race, time, and demographic variables such as the district's racial and gender composition. Our findings show that reliable data about political behavior can be extracted from social media. Behavioral economics tells us that emotions can profoundly affect individual behavior and decision-making. Does this also apply to societies at large, i.e. can societies experience mood states that affect their collective decision making? By extension is the public mood correlated or even predictive of economic indicators? Here we investigate whether measurements of collective mood states derived from large-scale Twitter feeds are correlated to the value of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) over time. We analyze the text content of daily Twitter feeds by two mood tracking tools, namely OpinionFinder that measures positive vs. negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of 6 dimensions (Calm, Alert, Sure, Vital, Kind, and Happy). We cross-validate the resulting mood time series by comparing their ability to detect the public's response to the presidential election and Thanksgiving day in 2008. A Granger causality analysis and a Self-Organizing Fuzzy Neural Network are then used to investigate the hypothesis that public mood states, as measured by the OpinionFinder and GPOMS mood time series, are predictive of changes in DJIA closing values. Our results indicate that the accuracy of DJIA predictions can be significantly improved by the inclusion of specific public mood dimensions but not others. We find an accuracy of 87.6 in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error by more than 6 . Index Terms—stock market prediction — twitter — mood analysis. In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media. This paper describes early work trying to predict stock market indicators such as Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500 by analyzing Twitter posts. We collected the twitter feeds for six months and got a randomized subsample of about one hundredth of the full volume of all tweets. We measured collective hope and fear on each day and analyzed the correlation between these indices and the stock market indicators. We found that emotional tweet percentage significantly negatively correlated with Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500, but displayed significant positive correlation to VIX. It therefore seems that just checking on twitter for emotional outbursts of any kind gives a predictor of how the stock market will be doing the next day. The body of content available on Twitter undoubtedly contains a diverse range of political insight and commentary. But, to what extent is this representative of an electorate? Can we model political sentiment effectively enough to capture the voting intentions of a nation during an election capaign? We use the recent Irish General Election as a case study for investigating the potential to model political sentiment through mining of social media. Our approach combines sentiment analysis using supervised learning and volume-based measures. We evaluate against the conventional election polls and the final election result. We find that social analytics using both volume-based measures and sentiment analysis are predictive and wemake a number of observations related to the task of monitoring public sentiment during an election campaign, including examining a variety of sample sizes, time periods as well as methods for qualitatively exploring the underlying content.