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.