Prusa, Joseph D.

Sentiment analysis of tweets is an application of mining Twitter, and is growing
in popularity as a means of determining public opinion. Machine learning algorithms
are used to perform sentiment analysis; however, data quality issues such as high dimensionality, class imbalance or noise may negatively impact classifier performance.
Machine learning techniques exist for targeting these problems, but have not been
applied to this domain, or have not been studied in detail. In this thesis we discuss
research that has been conducted on tweet sentiment classification, its accompanying
data concerns, and methods of addressing these concerns. We test the impact
of feature selection, data sampling and ensemble techniques in an effort to improve
classifier performance. We also evaluate the combination of feature selection and
ensemble techniques and examine the effects of high dimensionality when combining
multiple types of features. Additionally, we provide strategies and insights for
potential avenues of future work.