Ghana Election Sentiment Analysis Project - Complete Summary
🎯 Project Overview
A comprehensive sentiment analysis system that analyzes Ghanaian Twitter discourse about the 2024 presidential candidates John Mahama and Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia using advanced Natural Language Processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques.
🏛️ Academic Context
Institution: University of Energy and Natural Resources (UENR)
Department: Information Technology and Decision Sciences (ITDS)
Project Type: Final Year Research Project
Timeline: January 2024 - November 2024 (pre-election period)
🎯 Core Objectives
Main Objective
To develop and evaluate an automated sentiment analysis system using NLP and machine learning to classify Ghanaian sentiments on Twitter about the presidential candidates.
Specific Objectives
Data Collection: Gather tweets using Twitter API focused on both candidates
Text Preprocessing: Clean and normalize text data using NLP techniques
Model Implementation: Train and compare multiple ML models (SVM, Random Forest, XGBoost, Logistic Regression, LightGBM, TextBlob)
Performance Evaluation: Assess models using accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score
Visualization: Create interactive dashboards showing sentiment trends
Deployment: Build end-to-end pipeline for future political analysis
đź”§ Technical Architecture
Data Pipeline
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Twitter API → Data Collection → Text Preprocessing → Feature Extraction → Model Training → Evaluation → Visualization
Key Technologies
Programming: Python 3.10
ML Libraries: Scikit-learn, XGBoost, LightGBM, NLTK, TextBlob
Development: Jupyter Notebook, VS Code
Visualization: Matplotlib, Seaborn, Plotly, Chart.js
Deployment: Flask, Docker, GitHub Pages
Machine Learning Models
Support Vector Machines (SVM) - Best performer (85% accuracy)
Random Forest - Strong ensemble method
XGBoost & LightGBM - Advanced gradient boosting
Logistic Regression - Interpretable baseline model
TextBlob - Lexicon-based approach for comparison
📊 Key Findings …