How StockTwits Applies Social and Sentiment Data Science

Machine learning is cool, but let's spend a few minutes talking process – the application of data science to derive business insights. Let's look in particular at capital markets, where news and mood drive trading strategies. Trading is highly competitive, yet traders like to talk, and StockTwits – "the largest social network for investors and traders" – is where they often do it. Traders flock to the platform to share assertions and perceptions, analyses and predictions. This activity produces a combination of hard data and subjective information that can be profitably modeled via natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and machine learning.