• Asia pacific journal of information systems
• /
• v.24 no.2
• /
• pp.233-253
• /
• 2014

Can the stock market really be predicted? Stock market prediction has attracted much attention from many fields including business, economics, statistics, and mathematics. Early research on stock market prediction was based on random walk theory (RWT) and the efficient market hypothesis (EMH). According to the EMH, stock market are largely driven by new information rather than present and past prices. Since it is unpredictable, stock market will follow a random walk. Even though these theories, Schumaker [2010] asserted that people keep trying to predict the stock market by using artificial intelligence, statistical estimates, and mathematical models. Mathematical approaches include Percolation Methods, Log-Periodic Oscillations and Wavelet Transforms to model future prices. Examples of artificial intelligence approaches that deals with optimization and machine learning are Genetic Algorithms, Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Neural Networks. Statistical approaches typically predicts the future by using past stock market data. Recently, financial engineers have started to predict the stock prices movement pattern by using the SNS data. SNS is the place where peoples opinions and ideas are freely flow and affect others' beliefs on certain things. Through word-of-mouth in SNS, people share product usage experiences, subjective feelings, and commonly accompanying sentiment or mood with others. An increasing number of empirical analyses of sentiment and mood are based on textual collections of public user generated data on the web. The Opinion mining is one domain of the data mining fields extracting public opinions exposed in SNS by utilizing data mining. There have been many studies on the issues of opinion mining from Web sources such as product reviews, forum posts and blogs. In relation to this literatures, we are trying to understand the effects of SNS exposures of firms on stock prices in Korea. Similarly to Bollen et al. [2011], we empirically analyze the impact of SNS exposures on stock return rates. We use Social Metrics by Daum Soft, an SNS big data analysis company in Korea. Social Metrics provides trends and public opinions in Twitter and blogs by using natural language process and analysis tools. It collects the sentences circulated in the Twitter in real time, and breaks down these sentences into the word units and then extracts keywords. In this study, we classify firms' exposures in SNS into two groups: positive and negative. To test the correlation and causation relationship between SNS exposures and stock price returns, we first collect 252 firms' stock prices and KRX100 index in the Korea Stock Exchange (KRX) from May 25, 2012 to September 1, 2012. We also gather the public attitudes (positive, negative) about these firms from Social Metrics over the same period of time. We conduct regression analysis between stock prices and the number of SNS exposures. Having checked the correlation between the two variables, we perform Granger causality test to see the causation direction between the two variables. The research result is that the number of total SNS exposures is positively related with stock market returns. The number of positive mentions of has also positive relationship with stock market returns. Contrarily, the number of negative mentions has negative relationship with stock market returns, but this relationship is statistically not significant. This means that the impact of positive mentions is statistically bigger than the impact of negative mentions. We also investigate whether the impacts are moderated by industry type and firm's size. We find that the SNS exposures impacts are bigger for IT firms than for non-IT firms, and bigger for small sized firms than for large sized firms. The results of Granger causality test shows change of stock price return is caused by SNS exposures, while the causation of the other way round is not significant. Therefore the correlation relationship between SNS exposures and stock prices has uni-direction causality. The more a firm is exposed in SNS, the more is the stock price likely to increase, while stock price changes may not cause more SNS mentions.

• Journal of Intelligence and Information Systems
• /
• v.19 no.3
• /
• pp.141-156
• /
• 2013

Social media is a representative form of the Web 2.0 that shapes the change of a user's information behavior by allowing users to produce their own contents without any expert skills. In particular, as a new communication medium, it has a profound impact on the social change by enabling users to communicate with the masses and acquaintances their opinions and thoughts. Social media data plays a significant role in an emerging Big Data arena. A variety of research areas such as social network analysis, opinion mining, and so on, therefore, have paid attention to discover meaningful information from vast amounts of data buried in social media. Social media has recently become main foci to the field of Information Retrieval and Text Mining because not only it produces massive unstructured textual data in real-time but also it serves as an influential channel for opinion leading. But most of the previous studies have adopted broad-brush and limited approaches. These approaches have made it difficult to find and analyze new information. To overcome these limitations, we developed a real-time Twitter trend mining system to capture the trend in real-time processing big stream datasets of Twitter. The system offers the functions of term co-occurrence retrieval, visualization of Twitter users by query, similarity calculation between two users, topic modeling to keep track of changes of topical trend, and mention-based user network analysis. In addition, we conducted a case study on the 2012 Korean presidential election. We collected 1,737,969 tweets which contain candidates' name and election on Twitter in Korea (http://www.twitter.com/) for one month in 2012 (October 1 to October 31). The case study shows that the system provides useful information and detects the trend of society effectively. The system also retrieves the list of terms co-occurred by given query terms. We compare the results of term co-occurrence retrieval by giving influential candidates' name, 'Geun Hae Park', 'Jae In Moon', and 'Chul Su Ahn' as query terms. General terms which are related to presidential election such as 'Presidential Election', 'Proclamation in Support', Public opinion poll' appear frequently. Also the results show specific terms that differentiate each candidate's feature such as 'Park Jung Hee' and 'Yuk Young Su' from the query 'Guen Hae Park', 'a single candidacy agreement' and 'Time of voting extension' from the query 'Jae In Moon' and 'a single candidacy agreement' and 'down contract' from the query 'Chul Su Ahn'. Our system not only extracts 10 topics along with related terms but also shows topics' dynamic changes over time by employing the multinomial Latent Dirichlet Allocation technique. Each topic can show one of two types of patterns-Rising tendency and Falling tendencydepending on the change of the probability distribution. To determine the relationship between topic trends in Twitter and social issues in the real world, we compare topic trends with related news articles. We are able to identify that Twitter can track the issue faster than the other media, newspapers. The user network in Twitter is different from those of other social media because of distinctive characteristics of making relationships in Twitter. Twitter users can make their relationships by exchanging mentions. We visualize and analyze mention based networks of 136,754 users. We put three candidates' name as query terms-Geun Hae Park', 'Jae In Moon', and 'Chul Su Ahn'. The results show that Twitter users mention all candidates' name regardless of their political tendencies. This case study discloses that Twitter could be an effective tool to detect and predict dynamic changes of social issues, and mention-based user networks could show different aspects of user behavior as a unique network that is uniquely found in Twitter.