title: Studying User Income through Language, Behaviour and Affect in Social Media.
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.
authors.affiliation: Positive Psychology Center, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, United States of America.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Preoţiuc-Pietro
authors.affiliation: Center for Language and Speech Processing, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, United States of America.
authors.forename: Svitlana
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Volkova
authors.affiliation: Computer Science Department, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Vasileios
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Lampos
authors.affiliation: Microsoft Research, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Yoram
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Bachrach
authors.affiliation: Computer Science Department, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Nikolaos
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Aletras
mesh_terms: D000339:Affect; D003625:Data Collection / Q000145:classification / Q000379:methods / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004522:Educational Status; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007182:Income / Q000145:classification / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D007360:Intelligence; D007802:Language; D016014:Linear Models; D008297:Male; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D061108:Social Media / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*