Mining the Evolution of Political Opinion

Abstract

This thesis examines political opinion through Reddit comments and pattern set mining. In 2016 the world saw an increasing effect of social media on public opinion. Large internet communities played a major role in disseminating propaganda, information, and misguiding voters. These issues are examined through the extraction and compression of patterns present in word usage and frequency. Moreover, experiments done on synthetic data show that compression is a useful tool in extracting and matching patterns from various datasets. Lastly, the same approach is then used to examine changes in opinion on Reddit’s comment data.