Justin Grimmer et al., "Text as Data: A New Framework for Machine Learning and the Social Sciences" (Princeton UP, 2022)
New Books in Economics
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Using a Causal Approach to a Predictive Question
A lot of what these tools have been designed to do in the first place, are designed to make predictions based off o text. So that could be some of what justin was talking about, like using social media to predict how well the stock market is going to do. Or i could ask a different causal question, was, how does, how do twitter posts affect people's opinion about a political candidate? And those are two extremely different questions. In the prediction question, you're using all information about the text to make the prediction of votes. And that might not be actually a causal story at all though. That information that you're using for prediction might just be something about uxiliary
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