Recent studies in big data analytics and natural language processing develop automatic techniques in analyzing sentiment in the social media information. In addition, the growing user base of social media and the high volume of posts also provide valuable sentiment information to predict the price fluctuation of the cryptocurrency. This research is directed to predicting the volatile price movement of cryptocurrency by analyzing the sentiment in social media and finding the correlation between them. While previous work has been developed to analyze sentiment in English social media posts, we propose a method to identify the sentiment of the Chinese social media posts from the most popular Chinese social media platform Sina-Weibo. We develop the pipeline to capture Weibo posts, describe the creation of the crypto-specific sentiment dictionary, and propose a long short-term memory (LSTM) based recurrent neural network along with the historical cryptocurrency price movement to predict the price trend for future time frames. The conducted experiments demonstrate the proposed approach outperforms the state of the art auto regressive based model by 18.5% in precision and 15.4% in recall.

Authors and Affiliations

1. University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Baltimore, USA

   Xin Huang & Wenbin Zhang

2. Leibniz University Hannover, Hanover, Germany

   Xuejiao Tang & Vasileios Iosifidis

3. McGill University, Montreal, Canada

   Mingli Zhang

4. University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

   Jayachander Surbiryala

5. Guangdong Pharmaceutical University, Guangzhou, China

   Zhen Liu

6. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, Australia

   Ji Zhang

Corresponding author

Correspondence toXin Huang.

Editors and Affiliations

1. Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark

   Christian S. Jensen

2. Singapore Management University, Singapore, Singapore

   Ee-Peng Lim

3. Academia Sinica, Taipei, Taiwan

   De-Nian Yang

4. The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, USA

   Wang-Chien Lee

5. National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

   Vincent S. Tseng

6. Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece

   Vana Kalogeraki

7. National Cheng Kung University, Tainan City, Taiwan

   Jen-Wei Huang

8. National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan

   Chih-Ya Shen

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