Forecasting the U.S. oil markets based on social media information during the COVID-19 pandemic

Accurate oil market forecasting plays an important role in the theory and application of oil supply chain management for profit maximization and risk minimization. However, the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has compelled governments worldwide to impose restrictions, consequently forcing the closure of most social and economic activities. The latter leads to the volatility of the oil markets and poses a huge challenge to oil market forecasting. Fortunately, the social media information can finely reflect oil market factors and exogenous factors, such as conflicts and political instability. Accordingly, this study collected vast online oil news and used convolutional neural network to extract relevant information automatically. Oil markets are divided into four categories: oil price, oil production, oil consumption, and oil inventory. A total of 16,794; 9,139; 8,314; and 8,548 news headlines were collected in four respective cases. Experimental results indicate that social media information contributes to the forecasting of oil price, oil production and oil consumption. The mean absolute percentage errors are respectively 0.0717, 0.0144 and 0.0168 for the oil price, production, and consumption prediction during the COVID-19 pandemic. Marketers must consider the impact of social media information on the oil or similar markets, especially during the COVID-19 outbreak.