Data Mining and Social Network Analysis, and the Stock Market

There’s a lot of hoopla and hype in the news these days about Data Mining and Social Network Analysis. Both of these topics are interesting to me, so I’ve been doing a lot of reading as of late. Some of the links I’ve found that I really like are Introduction to Social Network Methods which is a nice text and a good introduction to SNA, and these two links about charting office connections and its importance. If you are interested in more links, be sure to check out my del.icio.us bookmarks. Also, be sure to poke around in del.icio.us, there’s a ton of info in that system. On a somewhat related note, my boss has started a blog. In a past life he was a stock broker so he started up a site called Hip Egg where he does technical analysis of various companies stocks by looking at their graphs. He has some fascinating ideas and it has stirred up a lot of talk in our office about stocks and data analysis in general. In fact, the discussion has inspired me to pull out my copy of Spidering Hacks and start looking at what information is out there for various companies. My idea is that I can whip up some python programs to go out there on the internet and gather a ton of data that will either support or refute his predictions about a stock. The reason I think this would be interesting to do is because he bases his predictions almost solely on the shape of the company’s graph; I feel that looking at the numbers behind a company (cash on hand, news reports, product launches, etc.) will give you a more accurate prediction. That and it will just be fun to tie together several topics like data mining, data analysis, graph/network math and theory, web crawling, and python as they apply to the stock market.