Predicting the future with AI

In recent times, opinion polls have been a little more miss than hit. In June 2016, the UK was due to vote in a referendum on their continued membership of the EU. At TheTin we thought: there must be a better, more accurate way of measuring the public mood.

A machine learning algorithm was used to track sentiment in tweets about Brexit. It was trained using polling and betting data along with news sources. Every day we calculated the percentage chances of leave vs remain. Had we not applied our own bias (the results were saying leave when no-one believed it) we would have predicted the right result.