Election Forecasting - George Mason...
11
Election Forecasting: Addressing the Conundrum of Twitter Analysis in Predicting the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries Sree Nori, Jun Wang, Srikanth Vadlamani, Stephen Andre
Transcript of Election Forecasting - George Mason...
Election Forecasting: Addressing the Conundrum of
Twitter Analysis in Predicting the
2020 Democratic Presidential Primaries
Sree Nori, Jun Wang, Srikanth Vadlamani, Stephen Andre
• Significance of Research
• The American Election Process
• Higher-Level Framework / Analytical Approach
• By-State Analysis
o Volume
o Sentiment
• Reflections
• Future Work
2
• What they did:
• Volume / Sentiment Analysis
• National- / Federal-Level Investigations
• How we differ:
• State-level Granularity on a National stage
• Simultaneous Elections
• Multiple Novel Approaches
3
• Two Political Parties
o Democrats / Republicans
• President
o Every 4 years
o 2 term maximum
• Primary
o 50 states
o Cast ballots
• 24 Democratic Contenders
• State Primaries Researched
o SC
o Super Tuesday: CA, NC, VA, TX
February 29
March 3
4
• Programming Languages
o Python
o R
• Data Harvesting Twitter API: Python tweepy
o Searches
▪ @JoeBiden, #SCPrimary
o Filtering
▪ Retweets, Bots, URLs
• Dataset: 4 x 255,095
Attribute Data Type
tweet.created_at Ordinal
tweet.user.location String
tweet.user.screen_name String
tweet.full_text String
5
• Data Wrangling: R
o Deduplication
o User Location / Handle @TXBob
o 34,443 genuine tweets
• Volume Analysis: R
o Total
o Daily
• Sentiment Analysis: Python nltk, textblob
o Total
o Positive, Neutral, Negative
• Visualizations: R plot, ggplot
6
South Carolina: 4th of 50, 6 of 24 Remaining
California: Super Tuesday: 3 Drop Out, 1 Jumps In
7
Primary Winner
Bernie Sanders
Primary Winner
Joe Biden
North Carolina: Super Tuesday Surprise Winner
Texas: Super Tuesday Surprise Winner
Virginia: Never a Super Tuesday Challenge
8
Primary Winner
Joe Biden
Primary Winner
Joe Biden
Primary Winner
Joe Biden
• Forecasting Efficacy
o Top 2 - 100%
• Accuracy
o Confusion Matrix
• Granularity
o Location Field
o @NCJohn
• Dynamic Field vs Presidential Field
o Buttigieg, Steyer, Klobuchar
o Bloomberg
• Demographics
o Electorate vs Twitter
o Sanders 9
• Longer Harvesting Period
o All 50 States
o Initial Field of 24
• Application in State / Provincial Elections
outside United States
• Application in other Languages
10
