Ask "Who", Not "What": Bitcoin Volatility Forecasting with Twitter Data

Understanding the variations in trading price (volatility), and its response to external information is a well-studied topic in finance. In this study, we focus on volatility predictions for a relatively new asset class of cryptocurrencies (in particular, Bitcoin) using deep learning representations of public social media data from Twitter. For the field work, we extracted semantic information and user interaction statistics from over 30 million Bitcoin-related tweets, in conjunction with 15-minute intraday price data over a 144-day horizon. Using this data, we built several deep learning architectures that utilized a combination of the gathered information. For all architectures, we conducted ablation studies to assess the influence of each component and feature set in our model. We found statistical evidences for the hypotheses that: (i) temporal convolutional networks perform significantly better than both autoregressive and other deep learning-based models in the literature, and (ii) the tweet author meta-information, even detached from the tweet itself, is a better predictor than the semantic content and tweet volume statistics.