How (Not) to Predict Elections
Published 1 October 2011Open access
Panagiotis Metaxas, Eni Mustafaraj, Daniel Gayo-Avello
Citations284
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TL;DR
It is found that electoral predictions using the published research methods on Twitter data are not better than chance and a set of standards that any theory aiming to predict elections (or other social events) using social media should follow is proposed.
Abstract
2011 IEEE International Conference on Privacy, Security, Risk, and Trust, and IEEE International Conference on Social Computing, Boston
Keywords
Computer ScienceSocial Sciences
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