Paper Number
2006
Paper Type
Completed
Description
In recent years, social media has become an indispensable source of information through which public attitudes, opinions, and concerns can be studied and quantified. This paper proposes an interpretable machine learning framework for predicting the Equity Market-related Economic Uncertainty Index using features generated from a popular discussion forum on Reddit. Our framework consists of a series of custom preprocessing and analytics methods, including BERTopic for latent topic identification and regularized linear models. Using our framework, we evaluate explanatory models with different configurations over a large corpus of Reddit posts belonging to the personal finance category. Our analysis generates valuable insights about discussion topics on Reddit and their efficacy in accurately predicting future economic uncertainty. The study demonstrates the potential of using social media data and interpretable machine learning to inform economic forecasting research.
Recommended Citation
Jiang, Jinhang; Feng, Mei; and Srinivasan, Karthik, "Can Conversations on Reddit Forecast Future Economic Uncertainty? An Interpretable Machine Learning Approach" (2023). ICIS 2023 Proceedings. 6.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2023/emergpand/emergpand/6
Can Conversations on Reddit Forecast Future Economic Uncertainty? An Interpretable Machine Learning Approach
In recent years, social media has become an indispensable source of information through which public attitudes, opinions, and concerns can be studied and quantified. This paper proposes an interpretable machine learning framework for predicting the Equity Market-related Economic Uncertainty Index using features generated from a popular discussion forum on Reddit. Our framework consists of a series of custom preprocessing and analytics methods, including BERTopic for latent topic identification and regularized linear models. Using our framework, we evaluate explanatory models with different configurations over a large corpus of Reddit posts belonging to the personal finance category. Our analysis generates valuable insights about discussion topics on Reddit and their efficacy in accurately predicting future economic uncertainty. The study demonstrates the potential of using social media data and interpretable machine learning to inform economic forecasting research.
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Comments
01-Emerging