Communications of the ACM
Carnegie Mellon Researchers Say Twitter Analysis Can Help Gamblers Beat the Spread on NFL Games
A new study considers how Twitter feeds may be used to predict the outcomes of NFL games.
Credit: Carnegie Mellon News (PA)
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) researchers are studying how to use analyses of Twitter feeds to predict the outcomes of National Football League football games.
The study encompassed three NFL seasons from 2010 to 2012, and involved the use of automated tools to sort through a stream of tweets that averaged 42 million messages a day in 2012. Out of those, the researchers pulled out messages with hashtags associated with individual NFL teams that were sent at least 12 hours after the start of the team's previous game and one hour before the start of its upcoming game. The goal was to see what might be learned from the collective wisdom or sentiments of fans, as reflected by their tweets, according to CMU professor Christopher Dyer.
The researchers found that their method was 55 percent accurate in predicting the winner with the point spread. Such an advantage may be sufficient to reap profit, Dyer notes. However, he points out that the analysis did not work well for the first four weeks of the season, nor was it useful in the last few weeks, when many teams begin changing their strategies in preparation for the post-season.
In the future, Dyer says improvements might be possible with a more sophisticated analysis of tweet content.
From Carnegie Mellon News (PA)
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