Kentucky Derby 2015 - Twitter Analysis

Tweet

The Oaks was run on Friday 1st May, and was contested by 14 3year old fillies. Tweets mentioning these runners were collected, as well as tweets mentioning “KYOaks” and “KentuckyOaks”. There were only 7210 tweets collected, which is a very small number, dwarfed by the number collected for the derby. The plot below shows the timeline of tweets sent.

Runners

The two plots below show the proportion of tweets that mention each of the 14 Oaks contenders, sent before the race started on the left, and after the race was completed on the right. The eventual winner, Lovely Maria was the 6th most tweeted about horse, mentioned in 8.67% of tweets . The pre race favourite Stellar Wind was mentioned in 15.95, she was a 16/5 favourite (23.8%).

Post race, the focus was unsurprisingly on the winner, mentioned in 76.13% of tweets, with runner up Shook Up mentioned in 8.51%.

Sentiment

The sentiment of tweets can be gauged (see sentiment section) both before the race started and after the race. The plots below show the distributions, the average sentiment pre race was 0.519, while post race the average sentiment increased marginally to 0.82