updated indian elections forecast

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SentElectTM: Forecasting Elections based on Sentiments in Social Media

V.S. SubrahmanianSentiMetrix, Inc. & University of Maryland

@[email protected]

Apr 19 2014

© Sentimetrix, IncAll rights reserved 2014

This work was performed for Sentimetrix, Inc.

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SentElectTM Election Application


On May 8 2013, Sentimetrix predicted the outcome of the upcoming Pakistan election in front of 100+ people in V.S. Subrahmanian’s keynote at the Sentiment Analysis Symposium in New York City

On May 9, the BBC said the election was too close to call “Pakistan Elections: Five Reasons why the vote is unpredictable”

Sentimetrix was correct!

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SentElectTM

• Currently tracks Twitter feeds on virtually any topic– Politicians– Political parties– Issues (in progress, expected completion April 2014)

• Identifies intensity of sentiment on each topic in each tweet.• Forecasts trends in terms of expected number of

supporters/opponents on Twitter• Identifies individuals who are most influential in shaping an

opinion/trend• Provides a single dashboard to cover all of this.


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SentElectTM

SentElectTM Functionalities Business UseIdentify sentiment and changes in sentiment on any given topic

Track sentiment on both your political campaign as well as your competitor’s

Learns a model on “big data” showing how support/opposition to a topic spreads

Understand how your campaign (and your opponent’s) are doing with voters and why

Forecast the expected number of people who will support/oppose a topic

Forecast how many people support/oppose your campaign and/or your opponent’s

Identify the most important individuals responsible for shaping/spreading opinion on a topic

Identify those shaping positive/negative opinion about you and see if you can get them to work on your behalf. Engage with influential Twitter users


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SentElectTM Case Study


• Upcoming Indian election• Identified 31 entities to track.• Learned diffusion models from July

15 – Jan 25 2014.• Tested models on Jan 25-Feb 20 data

(~26 days)• Forecast trends on all 31 entities

from Feb 20 2014 to May 15 2014.• Tested diffusion forecasts on January

25-Feb 20 2014 data with Pearson correlation coefficients consistently over 0.8, usually over 0.9.

SUMMARY STATISTICS

• Study reported here uses data from July 2013 to Feb 20 2014

• Forecasts made till May 15 2014.• 19.5M tweets studied in all• 16M distinct Twitter accounts • 40M edge networkTwitter collection done using Twitter ontology and semantic database developed by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. [@jahendler]

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BJP Forecast


July 15 2013

Feb 24 2014 Mar 24 2014

May 15 2014

OUTLOOK

• Positive support for BJP is growing at a faster rate than negatives.

• Outlook is good but more or less same as March 6 forecast.

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Narendra Modi Forecast Forecast


July 15 2013

Feb 24 2014Mar 24 2014

May 15 2014

OUTLOOK

• Positive support for Modi is growing at a much faster rate than negatives.

• Outlook is very good and has improved since our March 6 forecast.

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UPA Forecast


July 15 2013

Feb 24 2014 Mar 24 2014

May 15 2014

OUTLOOK• Opposition

to UPA exceeds support. It is also growing at a slightly faster rate.

• Outlook for the UPA is not good and has worsened slightly since the March 6 forecast

• Number of people tweeting about UPA is way smaller

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Congress Party Forecast


July 15 2013

Feb 24 2014

Mar 24 2014

May 15 2014

OUTLOOK• Congress

has more supporters than opponents.

• Growth in support Iarger than growth in opposition

• But number of supporters is small compared to BJP.

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Rahul Gandhi Forecast


July 15 2013

Feb 24 2014Mar 24 2014

May 15 2014

OUTLOOK• Sentiment

on Rahul Gandhi is strong and growth in supporters outweights growth in opponents.

• But in raw numbers, his 1/3 the supporters that Modi has.

• Outlook is good but not great.

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Arvind Kejriwal Forecast


July 15 2013

Feb 24 2014Mar 24 2014

May 15 2014

OUTLOOK• Kejriwal

will have more opponents than supporters by early May.

• Steep increase in both supporters and opponents around mid-December 2013.

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SentElect Summary Statistics


BJP Narendra Modi

UPA CongressParty

RahulGandhi

ArvindKejriwal

#Supporters Mar 24 2014

294848 96376 59880 9324 102541 54777

#Opponent Mar 24 2014

211002 43217 71514 5839 59958 42367

#SupportersMay 15 2014

385819 102669 68926 11289 147989 64371

#OpponentMay 15 2014

257902 48002 81436 7948 65820 71717

Accuracy (PCC*) Pos.

0.999 0.998 0.998 0.977 0.995 0.979

Accuracy (PCC) Neg.

0.988 0.998 0.998 0.970 0.996 0.971

* Pearson Correlation Coefficient

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Head to Head: BJP vs. UPA/Congress

• Mar 24 2014: – BJP shows almost 5 times as many supporters

as Congress/UPA supporters, up in ratio from a month back.

– BJP opponents are less than 3 times as many as Congress/UPA opponents.

– So BJP is doing well.• Forecast for May 15 2014:

– BJP will have almost 3x supporters as compared to opponents.

– Congress/UPA has about 10% more opponents than supporters.

• BJP’s outlook in terms of positives and negatives shows a combined growth.

• But UPA/Congress combined negatives exceed positives.

• And support for UPA/Congress is tepid raising the question of Congress/UPA supporters showing up to vote.

• In general, till May 15 2014, BJP seems to garner more support than Congress/UPA.


BJP -5/15

UPA/Congress - 5/15

BJP - 3/24

UPA/Congress - 3/24

0

500000

1000000

SupportOpposition

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Head to Head: Narendra Modi vs. Rahul Gandhi

• Mar 24 2014:– Mr. Gandhi has about 5% more

supporters than Mr. Modi.– But Mr. Gandhi has 1.4x as many

opponents in comparison to Mr. Modi.

• May 15 2014:– In terms of supporters, Mr. Gandhi

is pulling ahead of Mr. Modi with 1.5x supporters compared with Mr. Gandhi.

– But on opponents, Mr. Gandhi has 1.3x of the opponents Mr. Modi has.

• This reverses a trend seen in our Mar 6 2014 forecast.

• Head-to-head, Mr. Gandhi has improved his showing in between Feb 20 and Mar 24.


Modi -5/15

Gandhi - 5/15

Modi - 3/24

Gandhi - 3/24

0 100000 200000 300000

SupportOpposition

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Head to Head: Rahul Gandhi vs. Arvind Kejriwal

• Mar 24 2014:– Mr Gandhi has 2x supporters

w.r.t. Mr. Kejriwal– But he has 1.4x opponents w.r.t.

Mr. Kejriwal (down from 2x in our Feb 6 forecast)

• May 15 2014:– Mr. Gandhi will have over 2x

supporters that Mr. Kejriwal [an about turn from our Mar 6 forecast!]

– Mr. Kejriwal will have 1.2x opponents w.r.t. Mr. Gandhi, a significant reduction of the ratio from the last month.

• In short, Mr. Gandhi has made an about-turn in the race in terms of positives.

• Congress/UPA should outperform AAP/Mr. Kejriwal.


Kejriwal -5/15

Gandhi - 5/15

Kejriwal - 3/24

Gandhi - 3/24

0 100000200000300000

SupportOpposition

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Head to Head: Narendra Modi vs. Arvind Kejriwal

• Mar 24 2014:– Mr Modi has 1.9x supporters as Mr.

Kejriwal– But on opponents, he is more or

less even with Mr. Kejriwal (a sharp reduction from our Mar 6 talk)

• May 15 2014:– Mr. Modi and Mr. Kejriwal will have

about 1.6x the supporters of Mr. Kejriwal

– Mr. Kejriwal will have about 1.5x the number of opponents as Mr. Modi

• Overall, the situation in the Modi vs. Kejriwal race has not changed much.

• Though support for Mr. Kejriwal is growing, opposition is growing at a much faster rate.

• We expect BJP to handily outperform AAP/Mr. Kejriwal.


Kejriwal -5/15

Modi - 5/15

Kejriwal - 3/24

Modi - 3/24

050000

100000

150000

200000

SupportOpposition

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Forecast Summary


Forecast #1

• Narendra Modi will be India’s next Prime Minister.

Forecast #2

• BJP (by itself) will fall short of a majority in Parliament, securing less than 272 seats.

Forecast #3

• Next Indian government will be a BJP-led coalition

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Forecast Risks

• Our forecast can go wrong.– Risk #1 Forecasting based on unsupervised learning is difficult at

best. No training data connecting votes on the ground in India to number of supporters/opponents on Twitter. Selection bias.

– Risk #2 Forecast is based on publicly available Twitter data, not on entire Twitter fire-hose.

– Risk #3 Twitter-based and technology based risks: geo-location issues, bots/sybils/fake accounts.

– Risk #4 Changing situation on the ground with new allegations (e.g. corruption) emerging frequently.

– Risk #5 External events we can’t control for (e.g. terrorist attacks) can dramatically change the electoral landscape.


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One Sybil’s strategy: @IsabellaObregom

1. Take tweet from a reputable account:– @AapKaJawab, an Aam Aadmi Party enthusiast, retweets:

“Arvind Kejriwal breaks into Manna Dey song on brotherhood at swearing-in – http://t.co/bVCHPte60k”

2. Follow link, rewrap in new shortened URL– @AapKaJawab’s link leads to an Indian news article– @IsabellaObregom shrinks URL with Adf.ly, tweets:

“Arvind Kejriwal breaks into Manna Dey song on brotherhood at swearing-in http://t.co/81cq9eyrNh”

3. @IsabellaObregom now paid per click through Adf.ly!

(In early 2014, Adf.ly and Twitter suspended account – original owner tweeted only in Spanish)


http://t.co/bVCHPte60k

http://t.co/81cq9eyrNh

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A larger Sybil network in our dataset

• We found many Sybil/bot accounts• @Marie____Taylor and @Amy____Jones tweet

identically, except different shortened links.– Overlapping network of followers– 100K+ tweets– Many “smaller” inactive followers, each following 30-

40 random people, with 30-40 bot followers.– Related: @Lea___Smith, @Megan__Martinez, etc…


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SentiMetrix Contact Information

• Address 6017 Southport Drive20814 Bethesda MDUSA

• E-mail [email protected]

• www.sentimetrix.com• Telephone +1 240 479

9286

• V.S. Subrahmanian• Twitter: @vssubrah• Email:

[email protected]• www.cs.umd.edu/~vs/• Telephone: +1 301 405

6724


mailto:[email protected]

http://www.cs.umd.edu/~vs/

updated indian elections forecast

Data & Analytics

manna dey

arvind kejriwal

faster rate

march 6 forecast

2x supporters

515 kejriwal

515 gandhi

324 gandhi