Data Science Capstone Project Featured in Georgia Southern Magazine Online
Want to know who’s going to win an election? A Georgia Southern study suggests you might find the answer on Twitter.
Information Technology data science graduates Garrett Neidlinger, Chris Bergin and Jacob Dahlberg created a capstone senior project that analyzed the political opinions of Twitter users against Democrat and Republican Primary results. They captured almost 17 million tweets over a month-and-a-half surrounding Super Tuesday on March 1, and used search terms based on primary and caucus names, candidate names and slogans.
After analyzing the data, one of the study models suggested a strong correlation between the opinions of verified Twitter users and the number of delegates a candidate received in each election.
Studies like this one demonstrate the potential of “big data” not just for analyzing politics, but also for making predictions, creating efficiency and solving problems not only in businesses and organizations, but also in society as a whole.
Cheryl Aasheim, professor of Information Technology and one of the architects of the undergraduate data science concentration at Georgia Southern, believes that with all this data out there accumulating exponentially, we’re only scratching the surface of what can be done with it.
Read the entire article titled Predicting the Election with Twitter in the fall 2016 issue of Georgia Southern Magazine Online.
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