Nowcasting unemployment rate during the COVID-19 pandemic using Twitter data: The case of South Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The global economy has been hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many countries are experiencing a severe and destructive recession. A significant number of firms and businesses have gone bankrupt or been scaled down, and many individuals have lost their jobs. The main goal of this study is to support policy- and decision-makers with additional and real-time information about the labor market flow using Twitter data. We leverage the data to trace and nowcast the unemployment rate of South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, we create a dataset of unemployment-related tweets using certain keywords. Principal Component Regression (PCR) is then applied to nowcast the unemployment rate using the gathered tweets and their sentiment scores. Numerical results indicate that the volume of the tweets has a positive correlation, and the sentiments of the tweets have a negative correlation with the unemployment rate during and before the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the now-casted unemployment rate using PCR has an outstanding evaluation result with a low Root Mean Square Error (RMSE), Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE), Symmetric MAPE (SMAPE) of 0.921, 0.018, 0.018, respectively and a high R2-score of 0.929.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".