Artificial neural networks applied for predicting and explaining the education level of Twitter users

This paper provides a novel procedure to estimate the education level of social network (SN) users by leveraging artificial neural networks (ANN). Additionally, it provides a robust methodology to extract explanatory insights from ANN models. It also contributes to the study of socio-demographic phenomena by utilizing less explored data sources, such as social media. It proposes Twitter data as an alternative data source for in-depth social studies, and ANN for complex patterns recognition. Moreover, cutting edge technology, such as face recognition, on social media data are applied to explain the social characteristics of country-specific users. We use nine variables and three hidden layers of neurons to identify high-skilled users. The resulted model describes well the level of education by correctly estimating it with an accuracy of 95% on the training set and an accuracy of 92% on a testing set. Approximately 30% of the analyzed users are highly skilled and this share does not differ among the two genders. However, it tends to be lower among users younger than 30 years old. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s13278-021-00832-1.