
Predicting the Turkish Elections with Twitter Data - ataspinar
https://ataspinar.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/predicting-the-turkish-general-elections-with-twitter-data/
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gus_massa
Looks like a interesting but difficult project. From the article:

> _The question then is to what extent the content of Twitter is
> representative of voting behaviour and how accurately we can predict the
> results of an election with Twitter data._

Some demographics (young? city?) are overrepresented than others (old?
farms?). In some cases, it's cool to vote publically for a party, so the
people is more eager to say it publically or directly lie in the tweets. In
other cases, people is afraid to say publically that they will vote for a
party ...

I think you will need many magical constants that are not available until you
have 3 or 4 previous elections to fit the data.

Can you make a prediction for each province / state?

Good look, and post the progress and predictions _before_ the election, and a
post-mortem analysis after.

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ataspinar
yes I believe that some parties will be overrepresented if you solely look at
the volume of tweets. This is simply due to the fact that Twitter in Turkey is
more popular under young and educated people(1). It should however not be
difficult to take this into account in the linear regression algorithm,
because the tuning parameters can be determined with data from the previous
elections.

I had made an prediction for each province after initially collecting all the
tweets, but the results were not accurate. At the moment I have also
determined the location of about 33% of the twitter accounts and I hope the
result will be better if I exclude all Twitterers which are not from the same
province as the one I am doing the calculation on.

Thanks for the feedback :)

(1) [http://webrazzi.com/2014/07/17/genart-ve-nielsenin-
turkiyede...](http://webrazzi.com/2014/07/17/genart-ve-nielsenin-turkiyede-
twitter-kullanici-istatistikleri/)

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ataspinar
For nearly a century it was only possible to find out what the general public
thinks with traditional polling, which costs thousands or even millions of
dollars/euros. Since the rise of Web 2.0 Social Media analytics has been
increasingly popular. A lot has been said about the predictive power of
Twitter so far. According to some people you should be able to predict flu
epidemics, unemployment and even riots/revolutions. What about Elections?

I have tried to predict the outcome of Turkish General elections of 1 November
2015 using Twitter data and I believe I will be able to predict quiete
accurately. Within a few percent.

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alex_1290
yes this looks interesting. It seems quite difficult to capture all the
relevant terms in order to extract the holy formula within the boundaries of
the twitter stuff. but if you can predict the election within a confidence
bound of up to 7.43% I would say you have done a tremendous job and lives can
be saved.

~~~
ataspinar
Where does the number of 7.43 % come from?

