CNBC:
An artificial intelligence system that correctly predicted the last three U.S. presidential elections puts Republican nominee Donald Trump ahead of Democrat rival Hillary Clinton in the race for the White House.
MogIA was developed by Sanjiv Rai, founder of Indian start-up Genic.ai. It takes in 20 million data points from public platforms including Google, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube in the U.S. and then analyzes the information to create predictions.
The AI system was created in 2004, so it has been getting smarter all the time. It had already correctly predicted the results of the Democratic and Republican Primaries.
Data such as engagement with tweets or Facebook Live videos have been taken into account. The result is that Trump has overtaken the engagement numbers of Barack Obama’s peak in 2008 — the year he was elected president — by 25 percent.
Rai said that his AI system shows that the candidate in each election who had leading engagement data ended up winning the election.
“If Trump loses, it will defy the data trend for the first time in the last 12 years since Internet engagement began in full earnest,” Rai wrote in a report sent to CNBC.
Currently most national polls put Clinton and the Democrats ahead by a strong margin. Rai said his data shows that Clinton should not get complacent.
But the entrepreneur admitted that there were limitations to the data in that sentiment around social media posts is difficult for the system to analyze. Just because somebody engages with a Trump tweet, it doesn’t mean that they support him. Also there are currently more people on social media than there were in the three previous presidential elections.
“If you look at the primaries, in the primaries, there were immense amounts of negative conversations that happen with regards to Trump. However, when these conversations started picking up pace, in the final days, it meant a huge game opening for Trump and he won the primaries with a good margin,” Rai told CNBC in a phone interview.