Text Augmented Automatic Statistician for Predicting Approval Rates of Politicians

Abstract

Predicting an approval rate of politicians is a popular task. While a type of prediction is using a text mining from news articles, we introduce a text augmented Gaussian process to perform the prediction with contexts. We test our model with 2017 South Korea Presidential Election in 1) a quantitative evaluation, and 2) a qualitative analysis. The performance of the model with text input is better than the performance of the model without the text input, which has been a typical approach of applying the Gaussian process. Moreover, the model can capture keywords which provide behind rational of the prediction result, which was not provided with only temporal information.