Validation of Twitter opinion trends with national polling aggregates: Hillary Clinton vs Donald Trump

Measuring and forecasting opinion trends from real-time social media is a long-standing goal of big-data analytics. Despite its importance, there has been no conclusive scientific evidence so far that social media activity can capture the opinion of the general population. Here we develop a method to infer the opinion of Twitter users regarding the candidates of the 2016 US Presidential Election by using a combination of statistical physics of complex networks and machine learning based on hashtags co-occurrence to develop an in-domain training set approaching 1 million tweets. We investigate the social networks formed by the interactions among millions of Twitter users and infer the support of each user to the presidential candidates. The resulting Twitter trends follow the New York Times National Polling Average, which represents an aggregate of hundreds of independent traditional polls, with remarkable accuracy. Moreover, the Twitter opinion trend precedes the aggregated NYT polls by 10 days, showing that Twitter can be an early signal of global opinion trends. Our analytics unleash the power of Twitter to uncover social trends from elections, brands to political movements, and at a fraction of the cost of national polls

Harvesting Wisdom on Social Media for Business Decision Making

The proliferation of social media provides significant opportunities for organizations to obtain wisdom of the crowds (WOC)-type data for decision making. However, critical challenges associated with collecting such data exist. For example, the openness of social media tends to increase the possibility of social influence, which may diminish group diversity, one of the conditions of WOC. In this research-in-progress paper, a new social media data analytics framework is proposed. It is equipped with well-designed mechanisms (e.g., using different discussion processes to overcome social influence issues and boost social learning) to generate data and employs state-of-the-art big data technologies, e.g., Amazon EMR, for data processing and storage. Design science research methodology is used to develop the framework. This paper contributes to the WOC and social media adoption literature by providing a practical approach for organizations to effectively generate WOC-type data from social media to support their decision making

Intra-Organizational Boundary Spanning: A Machine Learning Approach

With the ubiquity of data, new opportunities have emerged for the application of data science and machine learning approaches to help enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of knowledge management. With the growing use of social media technologies in enterprise settings, one specific area of knowledge management warranting the use of big data analytics involves cross-boundary knowledge creation and management. The objective of this paper is to develop and test a machine learning approach that can assist knowledge managers in detecting three types of intra-organizational boundary spanning activities with the goal of predicting and improving such important outcomes as team effectiveness, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and innovation

COVID-19 and mobility in tourism cities: A statistical change-point detection approach

This study analyses the agenda setting on social media in the COVID-19 pandemic by exploiting one of the disruptive technologies, big data analytics. Our purpose is to examine whether the agenda of news organisations matches the public agenda on social media in crisis situations, and to explore the feasibility and efficacy of applying big data analytics on social media data. To this end, we used an unsupervised machine learning approach, structural topic modelling and analysed 129,965 tweets posted by UK news media and citizens during April 2, and 8, 2020. Our study reveals a wide diversity of topics in the tweets generated by both groups and finds only a small number of topics are similar, indicating different agendas set in the pandemic. Moreover, we show that citizen tweets focused more on expressing feelings and sharing personal activities while news media tweets talked more about facts and analysis on COVID-19. In addition, our results find that citizens responded more significantly to breaking news. The findings of the study contribute to the agenda setting literature and offer valuable practical implications

Three Essays on Big Data Consumer Analytics in E-Commerce

Consumers are increasingly spending more time and money online. Business to consumer e-commerce is growing on average of 20 percent each year and has reached 1.5 trillion dollars globally in 2014. Given the scale and growth of consumer online purchase and usage data, firms\u27 ability to understand and utilize this data is becoming an essential competitive strategy. But, large-scale data analytics in e-commerce is still at its nascent stage and there is much to be learned in all aspects of e-commerce. Successful analytics on big data often require a combination of both data mining and econometrics: data mining to reduce or structure (from unstructured data such as text, photo, and video) large-scale data and econometric analyses to truly understand and assign causality to interesting patterns. In my dissertation, I study how firms can better utilize big data analytics and specific applications of machine learning techniques for improved e-commerce using theory-driven econometrical and experimental studies. I show that e-commerce managers can now formulate data-driven strategies for many aspect of business including cross-selling via recommenders on sales sites to increasing brand awareness and leads via social media content-engineered-marketing. These results are readily actionable with far-reaching economical consequences

Big Data Reference Architecture for e-Learning Analytical Systems

The recent advancements in technology have produced big data and become the necessity for researcher to analyze the data in order to make it meaningful. Massive amounts of data are collected across social media sites, mobile communications, business environments and institutions. In order to efficiently analyze this large quantity of raw data, the concept of big data was introduced. In this regard, big data analytic is needed in order to provide techniques to analyze the data. This new concept is expected to help education in the near future, by changing the way we approach the e-Learning process, by encouraging the interaction between learners and teachers, by allowing the fulfilment of the individual requirements and goals of learners. The learning environment generates massive knowledge by means of the various services provided in massive open online courses. Such knowledge is produced via learning actor interactions. Also, data analytics can be a valuable tool to help e-Learning organizations deliver better services to the public. It can provide important insights into consumer behavior and better predict demand for goods and services, thereby allowing for better resource management. This result motivates to put forward solutions for big data usage to the educational field. This research article unfolds a big data reference architecture for e-Learning analytical systems to make a unified analysis of the massive data generated by learning actors. This reference architecture makes the process of the massive data produced in big data e-learning system. Finally, the BiDRA for e-Learning analytical systems was evaluated based on the quality of maintainability, modularity, reusability, performance, and scalability

Understanding Ethical Concerns in the Design, Application, and Documentation of Learning Analytics in Post-secondary Education

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2015. Major: Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication. Advisor: Ann Hill Duin. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 138 pages.The practice of predicting a student's level of success in order to provide targeted assistance, termed "learning analytics,"� emerged from a well-established business intelligence model popularly called "Big Data"�. The ethical impact of Big Data on business practices has been undeniable, however, the ethical concerns of Big Data methodology in academia have yet to be explored, as research in this emerging discipline is relatively new. Thus, the overarching question for this study is as follows: How can we use rhetorical, scientific, and technical communication perspectives to understand ethical concerns in the design, application, and documentation of learning analytics in post-secondary education? To investigate this question, I conducted a five-stage study using a cross-disciplinary perspective based on existing frameworks in rhetoric and scientific and technical communication, united by their ethical lens, from genre, persuasion, human-computer interaction, social power, semiotics, visual design, new media literacy, and pedagogy to create a matrix for understanding ethical concerns in learning analytics in post-secondary education. During this study, the inability of students to provide input into the learning analytics process was the concern most often revealed, followed by a lack of context for interpreting the data by both institutional users and students, and the potential inaccuracies in the predictive model caused by inaccurate or incomplete data. Secondary concerns included an undefined institutional responsibility to act on data, which could put the institution at risk for legal action, as well as the possibility for discrimination to occur during the learning analytics process. I provide strategies and responses to address ethical concerns in the design and documentation of learning analytics that should constitute a minimum level of ethical action. This minimal implementation would ensure that students are shown goodwill by the institution (design), and that institutions are properly implementing learning analytics in terms of transparency of process and equality of benefit to the student (documentation). The strategies and responses to address ethical concerns in the application of learning analytics would be more complex for each situation and type of learning analytics used, but should always consider student engagement and success as the priority

Trip Planner: A Big Data Analytics Based Recommendation System for Tourism Planning

Foreign tourism has gained immense popularity in the recent past. To make a rational decision about the destination to be visited one has to go through variety of social media sources with very large number of reviews, which is a tedious task. Automated analysis of these reviews is quite complex as it involves non structured text data having slang terms also. Moreover, these reviews are pouring in continuously. To overcome this problem, this paper provides a Big Data analytics-based framework to make appropriate selection of the destination on the basis of automated analysis of social media contents based upon the adaptation and augmentation of various tools and technologies. The framework has been implemented using Apache Spark and Bidirectional Encoder Representation Transformers (BERT) deep learning models through which raw text review are analysed and a final score based on five metrics is obtained to recommend destination for visit

Aligning Machine Learning for the Lambda Architecture

We live in the era of Big Data. Web logs, internet media, social networks and sensor devices are generating petabytes of data every day. Traditional data storage and analysis methodologies have become insufficient to handle the rapidly increasing amount of data. The development of complex machine learning techniques has led to the proliferation of advanced analytics solutions. This has led to a paradigm shift in the way we store, process and analyze data. The avalanche of data has led to the development of numerous platforms and solutions satisfying various business analytics needs. It becomes imperative for the business practitioners and consultants to choose the right solution which can provide the best performance and maximize the utilization of the data available. In this thesis, we develop and implement a Big Data architectural framework called the Lambda Architecture. It consists of three major components, namely batch data processing, realtime data processing and a reporting layer. We develop and implement analytics use cases using machine learning techniques for each of these layers. The objective is to build a system in which the data storage and processing platforms and the analytics frameworks can be integrated seamlessly