Title: An analysis of the 2016 US presidential election using Chanakya - a knowledge discovery platform for text mining

Authors: Rashmi Malhotra; Kunal Malhotra

Addresses: Decision and Systems Sciences Department, Saint Joseph's University, 5600 City Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19131, USA ' Department of Computer and Information Science, School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, University of Pennsylvania, 3330 Walnut Street, Levine Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6309, USA

Abstract: In this era of information overload, discovering knowledge is a challenge. However, a new generation of text mining tools enables researchers and practitioners to analyse large volumes of data. This paper illustrates the design of knowledge discovery system - Chanakya using text mining. Chanakya works in two stages. Stage 1 uses naive Bayes classifier, a supervised machine-learning algorithm to train for classes, as we explicitly provide training data that is labelled with classes. Stage 2 uses k-means analysis, an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm to determine what categories are emerging from the mentions of each class. We use the 2016 presidential elections Twitter feeds to illustrate the use of Chanakya. Chanakya offers a commentary on the current state of the political arena after analysing the candidate tweets and how people are reacting to these tweets.

Keywords: text mining; k-means analysis; supervised machine learning; Bayes classifier; knowledge discovery; USA.

DOI: 10.1504/IJKEDM.2018.092812

International Journal of Knowledge Engineering and Data Mining, 2018 Vol.5 No.1/2, pp.17 - 39

Received: 27 Feb 2018
Accepted: 03 Mar 2018
Published online: 29 Jun 2018 *

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