Predicting Indian Premier League (IPL) Cricket Match Results Using Social Media Analytics: An Opinion Mining Approach

Abstract

With the advent of Web 2.0, technology has taken a leap and penetrated into every human being’s life and people tend to share in a social space, in fact it has become the prominent choice of expression of feelings for the millennials. The most popular discussion topic would be sports and entertainment as the trend has taken a paradigm shift with the launch of online streaming platforms. In this article, I am trying to identify what do people discuss about Indian Premier League Cricket and its teams in an online space and trying to figure out the feasibility in using the sentiments or opinions from posts made in various social media platforms to predict the winner of a Match and eventually the League, thereby an effort to create a predictive mechanism to support the various betting and fantasy games like Dream 11. For predicting the results of a match, one can identify the number of posts made before a match for each of the team and the sentiments associated with the posts made in Facebook, blogs and other public forums. We can use this method to identify the winning team before the start of the match and the efficiency and precision of the method is calculated using the Support Vector Machine (SVM) which has been used in various seminal papers as the preferred classifier.

 Keywords: Sentiment Analysis, Indian Premier League, IPL Predictor, Opinion Mining.