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 versus negative mood and Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS) that measures mood in terms of six 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 86.7% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the DJIA and a reduction of the Mean Average Percentage Error (MAPE) by more than 6%.