Hints to forecast macroeconomic indicators

We propose a novel method to improve the forecast of macroeconomic indicators based on social network and semantic analysis techniques. In particular, we explore variables extracted from the Global Database of Events, Language, and Tone, which monitors the world's broadcast, print and web news. We investigate the locations and the countries involved in economic events (such as business or economic agreements), as well as the tone and the Goldstein scale of the news where the events are reported. We connect these elements to build three different social networks and to extract new network metrics, which prove their value in extending the predictive power of models only based on the inclusion of other economic or demographic indices. We find that the number of news, their tone, the network constraint of nations and their betweenness centrality oscillations are important predictors of the Gross Domestic Product per Capita and of the Business and Consumer Confidence indices

An investigation into customer perception and behaviour through social media research – an empirical study of the United Airline overbooking crisis

Airlines have been adopting yield management to optimise the perishable seat control problem and overbooking is a common strategy. This study outlines the connections between yield management, crises, and crisis communication. Using big data captured on a social media platform, this study aims to combine traditional yield management with emerging social big data analytics. As part of this, we use the twitter data on the 2017 United Airline (UA) to analyse the overbooking crisis. Our findings shed light on the importance of a more effective orchestration of yield management to avoid the escalation of crises during crisis communication phases

Predicting Saudi stock market Index by Incorporating GDELT using multivariate time series modelling

Prediction of financial and economic markets is very challenging but valuable for economists, business owners, and traders. Forecasting stock market prices depends on many factors, such as other markets’ performance, economic state of a country, and others. In behavioral finance, people’s emotions and opinions influence their transactional decisions and therefore the financial markets. The focus of this research is to predict the Saudi Stock Market Index by utilizing its previous values and the impact of people’s sentiments on their financial decisions. Human emotions and opinions are directly influenced by media and news, which we incorporated by utilizing the Global Data on Events, Location, and Tone (GDELT) dataset by Google. GDELT is a collection of news from all over the world from different types of media such as TV, broad- casts, radio, newspapers, and websites. We extracted two time series from GDELT, filtered for Saudi Arabian news. The two time series rep- resent daily values of tone and social media attention. We studied the characteristics of the generated multivariate time series, then deployed and compared multiple multivariate models to predict the daily index of the Saudi stock market