When Bitcoin encounters information in an online forum: Using text mining to analyse user opinions and predict value fluctuation

<div><p>Bitcoin is an online currency that is used worldwide to make online payments. It has consequently become an investment vehicle in itself and is traded in a way similar to other open currencies. The ability to predict the price fluctuation of Bitcoin would therefore facilitate future investment and payment decisions. In order to predict the price fluctuation of Bitcoin, we analyse the comments posted in the Bitcoin online forum. Unlike most research on Bitcoin-related online forums, which is limited to simple sentiment analysis and does not pay sufficient attention to note-worthy user comments, our approach involved extracting keywords from Bitcoin-related user comments posted on the online forum with the aim of analytically predicting the price and extent of transaction fluctuation of the currency. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated based on Bitcoin online forum data ranging over a period of 2.8 years from December 2013 to September 2016.</p></div

Statistical significance (<i>p</i>-values) of bivariate Granger causality correlation between Bitcoin transaction and concept of forum opinions.

<p>Statistical significance (<i>p</i>-values) of bivariate Granger causality correlation between Bitcoin transaction and concept of forum opinions.</p

Example of deep learning data set.

<p>The z-score (, where and represent the mean and standard deviation for every date, respectively) of data for the previous 12 days (<i>t</i> = 12) was used as the values.</p

Summary of crawled data.

<p>Summary of crawled data.</p

Example of deep learning data set.

<p>The z-score (, where and represent the mean and standard deviation for every date, respectively) of data for the previous 12 days (<i>t</i> = 12) was used as the values.</p

Pearson Correlation Coefficient result.

<p>Pearson Correlation Coefficient result.</p

Ten topics generated by the Bitcoin forum documents.

<p>Ten topics generated by the Bitcoin forum documents.</p

Concept for building the workflow.

<p>Concept for building the workflow.</p

System overview.

<p>System overview.</p

Experimental results of predicted Bitcoin fluctuation.

<p>Experimental results of predicted Bitcoin fluctuation.</p