Manaswi Patil
Bitcoin, the most successful cryptocurrency to date, is a decentralised digital currency that enables users to make peer-to-peer transactions securely. To date, the cryptocurrency market is worth more than 2 trillion USD and is accepted by many large companies as a legitimate source of funds. However, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have often been criticised for their volatile nature and uncertainty making it unsuitable for further adoption as a currency.
This research project aims to investigate the application of Sentiment Analysis for forecasting Bitcoin. It seeks to analyse the extent to which sentiment of social media data (Twitter) and artificial intelligence (AI) techniques can be utilised to solve the uncertainties and value fluctuations that cryptocurrencies face.
To perform the analysis, a software application was developed to collect Twitter data and examine the sentiment of investors towards Bitcoin using unsupervised Machine Learning techniques. Machine learning will be utilised to perform predictions of long-term values of Bitcoin and further analyse their accuracy.
Results from this research are expected to show the value of the predicted prices, and deduce the most efficient machine learning algorithms for price accuracy. Further, the results attained can help identify improvements of the algorithms used and their potential applications in other financial markets such as stock and forex trading.