Predicting the NFL using Twitter
This work addresses sports analytics and betting prediction for NFL enthusiasts and analysts, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new data source.
The paper tackled predicting NFL game outcomes and betting results by analyzing Twitter data alongside game statistics, finding that simple tweet-based features can match or exceed traditional statistical features in performance.
We study the relationship between social media output and National Football League (NFL) games, using a dataset containing messages from Twitter and NFL game statistics. Specifically, we consider tweets pertaining to specific teams and games in the NFL season and use them alongside statistical game data to build predictive models for future game outcomes (which team will win?) and sports betting outcomes (which team will win with the point spread? will the total points be over/under the line?). We experiment with several feature sets and find that simple features using large volumes of tweets can match or exceed the performance of more traditional features that use game statistics.