Cilj rada. Ispitati važnost histopatoloških čimbenika rizika i svrsishodnost načina liječenja u bolesnica s rakom endometrija u kirurškom – FIGO stadiju I. Metode. Retrospektivno je izdvojeno 219 ...bolesnica s rakom endometrija u kojih je učinjen sveobuhvatni staging (lavat negativan, limfne žlijezde negativne). Srednja dob bolesnica iznosila je 59 godina (SD 8, min. 39, maks. 75 godina). Vrijeme promatranja iznosilo je od 1 do 180 mjeseci, medijana 68 mjeseci. Analizirani su u odnosu na petogodišnje preživljenje sljedeći prognostički čimbenici: dob bolesnice, dubina invazije miometrija, histologija i diferenciranost tumora, vrsta histerektomije i primjena adjuvantne radioterapije. U 85 bolesnica učinjena je radikalna histerektomija, dok je njih 55 primilo adjuvantnu radioterapiju. Rezultati. Ukupno preživljenje promatrane skupine bolesnica iznosi 92,8%. Analizom svih prognostičkih parametara nije nađena značajnost u razlici preživljenja. Od 219 bolesnica njih 82 (37,4%) imale su kumulativne negativne prognostičke čimbenike, slabo diferencirani tumor ili neendometrioidni histološki nalaz ili invaziju miometrija preko polovice, a preživljenje između visoko rizične i nisko rizične skupine se bitno ne razlikuje (93,9% odnosno 91,2%). Primjena radikalne histerektomije uz adjuvantnu radioterapiju ne daje bolje rezultate preživljenja od radikalne histerektomije. Zaključak. Prema našoj retrospektivnoj analizi čimbenika rizika u bolesnica s rakom endometrija prvog FIGO stadija, analizirani čimbenici rizika nemaju prognostičko obilježje. Primjena radikalne histerektomije s ili bez adjuvantne radioterapije zdjelice ne pruža bolje rezultate u smislu preživljenja, i daljnju primjenu treba temeljito preispitati.
Social media are increasingly reflecting and influencing behavior of other complex systems. In this paper we investigate the relations between a well-known micro-blogging platform Twitter and ...financial markets. In particular, we consider, in a period of 15 months, the Twitter volume and sentiment about the 30 stock companies that form the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index. We find a relatively low Pearson correlation and Granger causality between the corresponding time series over the entire time period. However, we find a significant dependence between the Twitter sentiment and abnormal returns during the peaks of Twitter volume. This is valid not only for the expected Twitter volume peaks (e.g., quarterly announcements), but also for peaks corresponding to less obvious events. We formalize the procedure by adapting the well-known "event study" from economics and finance to the analysis of Twitter data. The procedure allows to automatically identify events as Twitter volume peaks, to compute the prevailing sentiment (positive or negative) expressed in tweets at these peaks, and finally to apply the "event study" methodology to relate them to stock returns. We show that sentiment polarity of Twitter peaks implies the direction of cumulative abnormal returns. The amount of cumulative abnormal returns is relatively low (about 1-2%), but the dependence is statistically significant for several days after the events.
We study the cohesion within and the coalitions between political groups in the Eighth European Parliament (2014-2019) by analyzing two entirely different aspects of the behavior of the Members of ...the European Parliament (MEPs) in the policy-making processes. On one hand, we analyze their co-voting patterns and, on the other, their retweeting behavior. We make use of two diverse datasets in the analysis. The first one is the roll-call vote dataset, where cohesion is regarded as the tendency to co-vote within a group, and a coalition is formed when the members of several groups exhibit a high degree of co-voting agreement on a subject. The second dataset comes from Twitter; it captures the retweeting (i.e., endorsing) behavior of the MEPs and implies cohesion (retweets within the same group) and coalitions (retweets between groups) from a completely different perspective. We employ two different methodologies to analyze the cohesion and coalitions. The first one is based on Krippendorff's Alpha reliability, used to measure the agreement between raters in data-analysis scenarios, and the second one is based on Exponential Random Graph Models, often used in social-network analysis. We give general insights into the cohesion of political groups in the European Parliament, explore whether coalitions are formed in the same way for different policy areas, and examine to what degree the retweeting behavior of MEPs corresponds to their co-voting patterns. A novel and interesting aspect of our work is the relationship between the co-voting and retweeting patterns.
We investigate the relationship between social media, Twitter in particular, and stock market. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Twitter volume and sentiment about the 30 companies in the Dow ...Jones Industrial Average index, over a period of three years. We focus on Earnings Announcements and show that there is a considerable difference with respect to when the announcements are made: before the market opens or after the market closes. The two different timings of the Earnings Announcements were already investigated in the financial literature, but not yet in the social media. We analyze the differences in terms of the Twitter volumes, cumulative abnormal returns, trade returns, and earnings surprises. We report mixed results. On the one hand, we show that the Twitter sentiment (the collective opinion of the users) on the day of the announcement very well reflects the stock moves on the same day. We demonstrate this by applying the event study methodology, where the polarity of the Earnings Announcements is computed from the Twitter sentiment. Cumulative abnormal returns are high (2-4%) and statistically significant. On the other hand, we find only weak predictive power of the Twitter sentiment one day in advance. It turns out that it is important how to account for the announcements made after the market closes. These after-hours announcements draw high Twitter activity immediately, but volume and price changes in trading are observed only on the next day. On the day before the announcements, the Twitter volume is low, and the sentiment has very weak predictive power. A useful lesson learned is the importance of the proper alignment between the announcements, trading and Twitter data.
Analyzing information from social media to uncover underlying real-world phenomena is becoming widespread. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the role of Twitter in identifying communities of ...influence when the ‘ground truth’ is known. We consider the European Parliament (EP) Twitter users during a period of one year, in which they posted over 560,000 tweets. We represent the influence on Twitter by the number of retweets users get. We construct two networks of influence: (i) core, where both users are the EP members, and (ii) extended, where one user can be outside the EP. We compare the detected communities in both networks to the ‘ground truth’: the political group, country, and language of the EP members. The results show that the core network closely matches the political groups, while the extended network best reflects the country of origin. This provides empirical evidence that the formation of retweet networks and community detection are appropriate tools to reveal real-world relationships, and can be used to uncover hidden properties when the ‘ground truth’ is not known.
Social media are an important source of information about the political issues, reflecting, as well as influencing, public mood. We present an analysis of Twitter data, collected over 6 weeks before ...the Brexit referendum, held in the UK in June 2016. We address two questions: what is the relation between the Twitter mood and the referendum outcome, and who were the most influential Twitter users in the pro- and contra-Brexit camps? First, we construct a stance classification model by machine learning methods, and are then able to predict the stance of about one million UK-based Twitter users. The demography of Twitter users is, however, very different from the demography of the voters. By applying a simple age-adjusted mapping to the overall Twitter stance, the results show the prevalence of the pro-Brexit voters, something unexpected by most of the opinion polls. Second, we apply the Hirsch index to estimate the influence, and rank the Twitter users from both camps. We find that the most productive Twitter users are not the most influential, that the pro-Brexit camp was four times more influential, and had considerably larger impact on the campaign than the opponents. Third, we find that the top pro-Brexit communities are considerably more polarized than the contra-Brexit camp. These results show that social media provide a rich resource of data to be exploited, but accumulated knowledge and lessons learned from the opinion polls have to be adapted to the new data sources.
Social media are increasingly reflecting and influencing behavior of other complex systems. In this paper we investigate the relations between a well-know micro-blogging platform Twitter and ...financial markets. In particular, we consider, in a period of 15 months, the Twitter volume and sentiment about the 30 stock companies that form the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) index. We find a relatively low Pearson correlation and Granger causality between the corresponding time series over the entire time period. However, we find a significant dependence between the Twitter sentiment and abnormal returns during the peaks of Twitter volume. This is valid not only for the expected Twitter volume peaks (e.g., quarterly announcements), but also for peaks corresponding to less obvious events. We formalize the procedure by adapting the well-known "event study" from economics and finance to the analysis of Twitter data. The procedure allows to automatically identify events as Twitter volume peaks, to compute the prevailing sentiment (positive or negative) expressed in tweets at these peaks, and finally to apply the "event study" methodology to relate them to stock returns. We show that sentiment polarity of Twitter peaks implies the direction of cumulative abnormal returns. The amount of cumulative abnormal returns is relatively low (about 1-2%), but the dependence is statistically significant for several days after the events.