The debate of US elections did rage on full swing before the shocking results were obtained and Donald Trump was elected the president. There were numerous people tweeting, blogging, and updating other social media platforms with their thoughts, and opinions. But all these were based on the data offered by the data researchers who had a rich source of information about what were the general view of the people about this infamous electoral race.

The power of data analytics is such now that an associate Prof Stantic was so confident about the results that he publicly announced his predictions including for the swing states, and what is more his predictions were right about them as well.

He stated on the issue by saying – “my algorithms showed clearly that based on previous patterns and sentiments in the social media about Trump, by the end of the November 8^th would take a massive lead despite it only being a 10 percent chance to win as per all the polling surveys at the time.

He further added, “That a day before that in a public address I was even able to pinpoint the exact states where Trump would win like Florida, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Someone in the audience even challenged me by going online and checking the data that Hillary was the favorite of 84 percent.

To that all I have to say is people are more likely to be honest about their preferences when telling their friends and family and not just answering polls. It is almost nerve wracking that completely accurate predictions can be made using just social media analysis.”

Even other Big Data analytics specialists have been able to correctly predict the outcomes of the US Presidential elections 2016 much ahead of time. Griffith’s Big Data and Smart Analytics Lab analyzed simple twitter comments during the end of July and were able to predict that if the elections had taken place at the time, Trump would have been the clear winner over Clinton. The results were even shared at that time in an article by The Conversation.

The same analytics lab was able to predict using similar methods and publically announced that the coalition would win over ALP at the Australian federal elections.

Over the past several years presidential and political elections have proved to be ideal test beds for the social media analytics, big data researchers and data analysts which can offer great details on how even the campaign gain more insight about potential voters and try and win over more. “These analytics methods can offer much better insights that simple telephone polling, especially at a time when landlines are barely in use and everybody has a caller-ID”, said professor Stantic.

“And that is why polls leading up to the elections had such an inconsistent outcome.”

He further went on to speak about Big Data by saying – “The amount of information or data we generate is a truly staggering one and that is continuing to grow. This publicly available data is secret treasure-trove of useful information, for those who know how to use it right.”

Professor Stantic further stated that Big Data analytics is a discipline that is faced with numerous challenges that comes with managing the sheer amount of data that no one has noticed. Similar predictions await us for a better and smarter world, about environmental changes of the Great Barrier Reef on Human sensors, gold coast visitor satisfaction etc. which have already been done on projects funded by the National Environmental Science Program and the City of Gold Coast.”

“We can further improve the predictive power of Big Data Analytics as there is a growing need for better, smarter and faster algorithms to perform deep learning on humungous volumes of data, that are being drawn from diverse areas and we are working on it.”

Thus it is evident that Big Data training if made feasible for the right hands can help change the world into a data-driven, smart-opia!

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