Predicting the Future With Social Media

In this paper, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo A. Huberman argue that it is possible to use social media to predict real-world outcomes by analysing the chatter from twitter on specific topics. They also demonstrate how the model that they use clearly outperforms traditional market-based predictors of success.

Excerpt

"Since social media can also be construed as a form of collective wisdom, we decided to investigate its power at predicting real-world outcomes. Surprisingly, we discovered that the chatter of a community can indeed be used to make quantitative predictions that outperform those of artificial markets. These information markets generally involve the trading of state-contingent securities, and if large enough and properly designed, they are usually more accurate than other techniques for extracting diffuse information, such as surveys and opinions polls. Specifically, the prices in these markets have been shown to have strong correlations with observed outcome frequencies, and thus are good indicators of future outcomes." (Asur & Huberman, 2010).

This resource was recommended by Stewart Lee in his blog post Social Networking for Evaluators

Sources

Asur, S., & Huberman, B. A. (2010). Predicting the future with social media. 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM international conference on web intelligence and intelligent agent technology, Washington DC. Retrieved from http://www.hpl.hp.com/research/scl/papers/socialmedia/socialmedia.pdf

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