Automan
CSE Economics/ISR
Tweets Automan Predict
Social Media
7.6 Billion Tweets
7.6 Billion Tweets
June 2011 - July 2012
7.6 Billion Tweets
June 2011 - July 2012
Automan
Prediction
US Initial Claims for Unemployment Insurance Chart
1 Week
3 Categories of Signals (16 Signals)Job Search
“find a job”
…
Lost job
“just fired”
…
Unemployment
“unemployment”
…
1 Week
Tweets
Predictive Signal
Auto-regression+ Seasonal factor
1 Week
3 Categories of Signals (16 Signals)Job Search
“find a job”
…
Lost job
“just fired”
…
Unemployment
“unemployment”
…
Tweets
2011 2012
350K
430K
370K
390K
410K
Initi
al C
laim
s
Time
Ground truth
Automan predictive signal
Initial Claims (SA) versus Twitter Signal
Release
Release
EconomistsAverage
Release
PredictEconomists
Average
Surprise!
Release
PredictEconomists
Average
2011 2012
-20K
0
20K
Time
Surprise
Automan prediction
Initi
al C
laim
s
Dolan Antenucci, Michael Cafarella, Erdong Li, Shaobo LiuComputer Science
Victor Bittorf, Arun Kumar, Christopher Ré, Ce ZhangComputer Science
Margaret Levenstein, Matthew ShapiroISR and Economics
Cred
itSp
ecia
l Th
anks
Spon
sors
Pete CafarellaQiaozhu MeiVijairam Parasuraman
Automan
A prototype tool for performing economic predictions using social media data.
Automan
A prototype tool for performing economic predictions using social media data.
ResultAutoman can generate a signal from social media data that tracks the true number of initial unemployment benefits claims.
Automan
A prototype tool for performing economic predictions using social media data.
Result 1
Automan can generate a signal from social media data that tracks the true number of initial unemployment benefits claims.
Result 2
Automan can explain roughly 1/3 of the error in economists’ predictions.