Master thesis | Statistical Science for the Life and Behavioural Sciences (MSc)
open access
Currently the ‘wish to move’ to another house of the Dutch people is measured through the WoON survey conducted every three years. A more frequent way of measuring is wished for to improve policy...Show moreCurrently the ‘wish to move’ to another house of the Dutch people is measured through the WoON survey conducted every three years. A more frequent way of measuring is wished for to improve policy making in housing. Nowadays, people express their ‘wish to move’ on social media. In this research, it was found that certain features derived from tweet texts distinguish ‘wish to move’ tweets from others. The best logistic regression classifier developed in this research achieves an F1-score of 0.556 in identifying ‘wish to move’ tweets indicating that it is possible to timely keep track of the proportion of the ‘wish to move’ proportion of the Dutch population active on Twitter. Further, it is found that actual relocation can be identified by following ‘wish to move’ users. By engineering features through aggregating their subsequent tweets, classifiers were established to automatically determine if a ‘wish to move’ user relocated in the follow-up period. The best logistic regression classifier can determine if ‘wish to move’ users relocated in the two subsequent years with an F1-score of 0.701. With it, the proportion of ‘wish to move’ users who actually relocated later can be estimated.Show less
