Stock Market Prediction Through Sentiment Analysis of Social-Media and Financial Stock Data Using Machine Learning

Abstract

Given the volatility of the stock market and the multitude of financial variables at play, forecasting the value of stocks can be a challenging task. Nonetheless, such prediction task presents a fascinating problem to solve using machine learning. The stock market can be affected by news events, social media posts, political changes, investor emotions, and the general economy among other factors. Predicting the stock value of a company by simply using financial stock data of its price may be insufficient to give an accurate prediction. Investors often openly express their attitudes towards various stocks on social medial platforms. Hence, combining sentiment analysis from social media and the financial stock value of a company may yield more accurate predictions. This thesis proposes a method to predict the stock market using sentiment analysis and financial stock data. To estimate the sentiment in social media posts, we use an ensemble-based model that leverages Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) models. We use an LSTM model for the financial stock prediction. The models are trained on the AAPL, CSCO, IBM, and MSFT stocks, utilizing a combination of the financial stock data and sentiment extracted from social media posts on Twitter between the years 2015-2019. Our experimental results show that the combination of the financial and sentiment information can improve the stock market prediction performance. The proposed solution has achieved a prediction performance of 74.3%.