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URCS researchers offer clues for why Trump won

February 20, 2017

Jiebo Luo and Yu Wang did not set out to predict who would win the 2016 U.S. presidential election. However, their exhaustive, 14-month study of each candidate’s Twitter followers–enabled by machine learning and other data science tools–offers tantalizing clues as to why the race turned out the way it did. “We wanted to understand how each of the candidate’s campaigns evolved, and be able to explain why someone won or lost,” says Professor Luo of computer science.