Modelling spatiotemporal variation of positive and negative sentiment on Twitter to improve the identification of localised deviations

Studies examining how sentiment on social media varies over time and space appear to produce inconsistent results. Analysing 16.54 million English-language tweets from 100 cities posted between 13 July and 30 November 2017, our aim was to clarify how spatiotemporal and social factors contributed to variation in sentiment on Twitter. We estimated positive and negative sentiment for each of the cities using dictionary-based sentiment analysis and constructed models to explain differences in sentiment using time of day, day of week, weather, interaction type (social or non-social), and city as factors. Tests in a distinct but contiguous period of time showed that all factors were independently associated with sentiment. In the full multivariable model of positive (Pearson's R in test data 0.236; 95% CI 0.231-0.241), and negative (Pearson's R in test data 0.306 95% CI 0.301-0.310) sentiment, city and time of day explained more of the variance than other factors. Extreme differences between observed and expected sentiment using the full model appeared to be better aligned with international news events than degenerate models. In applications that aim to detect localised events using the sentiment of Twitter populations, it is useful to account for baseline differences before looking for unexpected changes.