Using Twitter to predict football outcomes

Abstract: Twitter has been proven to be a notable source for predictive modelling on various domains such as the stock market, the dissemination of diseases or sports outcomes. However, such a study has not been conducted in football (soccer) so far. The purpose of this research was to study whether data mined from Twitter can be used for this purpose. We built a set of predictive models for the outcome of football games of the English Premier League for a 3 month period based on tweets and we studied whether these models can overcome predictive models which use only historical data and simple football statistics. Moreover, combined models are constructed using both Twitter and historical data. The final results indicate that data mined from Twitter can indeed be a useful source for predicting games in the Premier League. The final Twitter-based model performs significantly better than chance when measured by Cohen's kappa and is comparable to the model that uses simple statistics and historical data. Combining both models raises the performance higher than it was achieved by each individual model. Thereby, this study provides evidence that Twitter derived features can indeed provide useful information for the prediction of football (soccer) outcomes.