Social media aided sentiment analysis in forecasting

User generated contents on the web and social media is grow rapidly in this emerging information age. Social media provides a platform for people to create contents and share and bookmark in a tremendous way. The exponential growth of social media arouses much attention on the use of public opinion to make better decisions about a particular product, person or service. The social media like online forums, Twitter, Facebook, blogs and microblogs are proving to be extremely valuable resources for anticipating, detecting and forecasting significant societal events. It provides a lot of opportunities for users to voice their opinions openly. The analysis of sentiments obtained through social media along with the wisdom of crowds can automatically compute the collective intelligence of future performance in many areas like stock trend forecasting, box office sales, hot topic detection, election outcomes and so on. The proposed study aims to perform forecasting based on user sentiments in social media regarding hotspot and stock forecasting.