The PredNews forecasting model
Ana Cristina Bicharra García, William Silva, Luís Miguel Parreira Correia · 2018
The objective is to verify the hypothesis that it is possible to predict election outcomes with similar precision to that of traditional polls. We did sentiment analysis of online news comments about candidates and of their likes and dislikes to predict the two first candidates. Comments from the main Brazilian online newspapers were collected approximately 4 months before the 2016 municipal elections, in 14 municipalities with a total of 70 candidates. Results show that a linear regression model has a high accuracy and robustness, adding to a clear explanatory capability.