Twitter Sentiment Analysis for Bitcoin Price Prediction

Cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin, have become increasingly popular over the last decade. The price of Bitcoin has gone through several cycles of highs and lows. As a result, it is a widely discussed topic, especially on platforms like Twitter. Sentiment analysis is a research area of Natural Language Processing. It is used to determine whether the text is positive, negative, or neutral. Twitter tweets are more challenging to analyze when compared to other forms of text, due to the presence of irregular grammar, emoticons, and sarcasm. This study intends to analyze the effect of tweets on the stock price of Bitcoin. In order to study the effect, the sentiment associated with each tweet is calculated using VADER, and also the profession and follower count associated with verified users who tweet about bitcoin is found. Following this, a model is trained and tested using a combined dataset of tweet related data and historical bitcoin price data. It was found that the sentiment of tweets does correlate with the shift in the price of bitcoin.