Twitter-aided decision making: a review of recent developments

Abstract

Twitter is one of the largest online platforms where people exchange information. In the first few years since its emergence, researchers have been exploring ways to use Twitter data in various decision making scenarios, and have shown promising results. In this review, we examine 28 newer papers published in last five years (since 2016) that continued to advance Twitter-aided decision making. The application scenarios we cover include product sales prediction, stock selection, crime prevention, epidemic tracking, and traffic monitoring. We first discuss the findings presented in these papers, that is how much decision making performance has been improved with the help of Twitter data. Then we offer a methodological analysis that considers four aspects of methods used in these papers, including problem formulation, solution, Twitter feature, and information transformation. This methodological analysis aims to enable researchers and decision makers to see the applicability of Twitter-aided methods in different application domains or platforms.