Mapping Bitcoin Metrics Across Deep Web News and Sentiment with Tableau
Bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, have been a hot topic of conversation recently. The volatile digital currency rocketed from $1,000 to nearly $20,000 in 2017 before crashing back down to around $10,000 in January 2018. We thought it would be intriguing to query BrightPlanet’s Global News Data Feed to compare Bitcoin price trends with news mentions of cryptocurrency, and the sentiment associated with those news articles. After joining the news/sentiment data with the Bitcoin pricing data from the same time period, we visualized the data using Tableau.
Visualizing Bitcoin News Data
The first insight to jump out was the high correlation between the Bitcoin price and the number of news mentions, as you can see when those two measures are visualized with a scatterplot. The r-squared value of the linear regression line is 0.95, indicating a high level of predictability. The greater the price of Bitcoin, the more news articles regarding cryptocurrency are produced.
Click the image to view the interactive visualization
Using the coloring of the marks on both the scatterplot and treemap charts, which indicate the “Year” attribute of the monthly data, you can see the slow rise in popularity of Bitcoin in 2015 and 2016 before the explosion in 2017. Every month before May 2017 is clumped together in the bottom-left of the scatterplot, indicating a price range around $1,000 and a news article count between 100-350 articles per month.
Diving into Deep Web content
The dual-axis chart at the bottom of the dashboard shows the relationship trends between Bitcoin price and news article sentiment. BrightPlanet uses Rosoka Series 6 for entity tagging and extraction. The Rosoka data point we’re using in this dashboard is total sentiment at the document-level. To smooth out the trendlines and avoid large outliers, both sentiment and price were visualized as a 7-day moving average. The insights aren’t as striking in this chart, but you can generally see increases and decreases in sentiment shortly following corresponding increases and decreases in Bitcoin price.
If you hover over any single day on the line charts, you will see a “Top 10 Articles by Sentiment Intensity” chart. This ranking shows the top 10 news articles for that day based on difference from a “neutral” sentiment rating.
In addition to the two main measures, Price and Sentiment, shown by the line charts, we also added two additional measures to the view by using the “size” attribute of each line to show the volume of both news articles and Bitcoin trading. On the left-side (older) of the line chart, the lines are noticeably skinny. The skinniness indicates fewer news articles and a lower volume of Bitcoin trading. Towards the right-side (more recent) of the line chart, the lines grow thicker as both news mentions and Bitcoin trading volume increase.
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If you think your organization would benefit from trends and insights derived from access to a repository of news data with over 15 million articles from thousands of unique sources, check out BrightPlanet’s Global News Data Feed for a 30-day free trial.
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