TY - GEN
T1 - The wisdom of bookies? Sentiment analysis versus the NFL point spread
AU - Hong, Yancheng
AU - Skiena, Steven
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - The American Football betting market provides a particularly attractive domain to study the nexus between public sentiment and the wisdom of crowds. In this paper, we present the first substantial study of the relationship between the NFL betting line and public opinion expressed in blogs and microblogs (Twitter). We perform a large-scale study of four distinct text streams: LiveJournal blogs, RSS blog feeds captured by Spinn3r, Twitter, and traditional news media. Our results show interesting disparities between the first and second halves of each season. We present evidence showing usefulness of sentiment on NFL betting. We demonstrate that a strategy betting roughly 30 games per year identified winner roughly 60% of the time from 2006 to 2009, well beyond what is needed to overcome the bookie's typical commission (53%).
AB - The American Football betting market provides a particularly attractive domain to study the nexus between public sentiment and the wisdom of crowds. In this paper, we present the first substantial study of the relationship between the NFL betting line and public opinion expressed in blogs and microblogs (Twitter). We perform a large-scale study of four distinct text streams: LiveJournal blogs, RSS blog feeds captured by Spinn3r, Twitter, and traditional news media. Our results show interesting disparities between the first and second halves of each season. We present evidence showing usefulness of sentiment on NFL betting. We demonstrate that a strategy betting roughly 30 games per year identified winner roughly 60% of the time from 2006 to 2009, well beyond what is needed to overcome the bookie's typical commission (53%).
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/84890752802
U2 - 10.1609/icwsm.v4i1.14074
DO - 10.1609/icwsm.v4i1.14074
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84890752802
SN - 9781577354451
T3 - ICWSM 2010 - Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
SP - 251
EP - 254
BT - ICWSM 2010 - Proceedings of the 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
PB - AAAI Press
T2 - 4th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media, ICWSM 2010
Y2 - 23 May 2010 through 26 May 2010
ER -