Economics
The Health of a Country’s Economy Is Hiding in Plain Tweets
- Web-search queries can help predict nonfarm-payroll revisions
- Cell-phone location data can show the health of retail chains
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Apurv Jain has used some unconventional data to predict the course of U.S. employment: 1.2 billion tweets and 830 million web searches.
As a Microsoft Corp. researcher in 2014, he was inspired by a comment from former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen that labor-market conditions might be worse than official statistics indicated. So he began looking for unofficial ones.