This is the case with machine learning. They are used to finding some structure in data. Programmers design these machines to find common patterns and similar features within a huge amount of data, that a human obviously wouldn't be able to process. Unsupervised machines are utilised in many different fields; here are some examples.
Coming back to the initial issue I would like to recommend reading this article. The researchers in this study use twitter posts to analyse people's sentiments and opinions. Why could we not do the same thing to predict the presidential elections, or at least, to predict them in a social networking environment?
Here is a BBC article in which Nate Silver of the New York Times explains the science of presidential predictions
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20246741
Nice article Cathal
ReplyDeleteThere was a study done by a secondary school student in Dublin a few years ago using Twitter to map the mood of a nation. It won a prize in the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition. This is the link: http://thevibesofireland.com/ Some of the graphs are very interesting, especially the one showing reaction to Ireland agreeing to financial support from the EU.
ReplyDeleteGame theory is often used for strategic decision making and predicting behavior. Here is an interesting article that applies game theory for predicting political behavior: http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/2132065.pdf?acceptTC=true .
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