Studying User Income through Language, Behaviour and Affect in Social Media

PLoS One. 2015 Sep 22;10(9):e0138717. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138717. eCollection 2015.

Abstract

Automatically inferring user demographics from social media posts is useful for both social science research and a range of downstream applications in marketing and politics. We present the first extensive study where user behaviour on Twitter is used to build a predictive model of income. We apply non-linear methods for regression, i.e. Gaussian Processes, achieving strong correlation between predicted and actual user income. This allows us to shed light on the factors that characterise income on Twitter and analyse their interplay with user emotions and sentiment, perceived psycho-demographics and language use expressed through the topics of their posts. Our analysis uncovers correlations between different feature categories and income, some of which reflect common belief e.g. higher perceived education and intelligence indicates higher earnings, known differences e.g. gender and age differences, however, others show novel findings e.g. higher income users express more fear and anger, whereas lower income users express more of the time emotion and opinions.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Affect*
  • Data Collection / classification
  • Data Collection / methods
  • Data Collection / statistics & numerical data
  • Educational Status
  • Female
  • Humans
  • Income / classification
  • Income / statistics & numerical data*
  • Intelligence
  • Language*
  • Linear Models
  • Male
  • Reproducibility of Results
  • Social Media / statistics & numerical data*

Grants and funding

This work was supported by Templeton Religion Trust TRT-0048 (http://www.templeton.org/, DPP) and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EP/K031953/1 (http://www.epsrc.ac.uk/, VL NA). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.