This study explores a big and open database of soccer leagues in 10 European countries. Data related to players, teams and matches covering seven seasons (from 2009/2010 to 2015/2016) were retrieved from Kaggle, an online platform in which big data are available for predictive modelling and analytics competition among data scientists. Based on both preliminary data analysis, experts’ evaluation and players’ position on the football pitch, role-based indicators of teams’ performance have been built and used to estimate the win probability of the home team with the binomial logistic regression (BLR) model that has been extended including the ELO rating predictor and two random effects due to the hierarchical structure of the dataset. The predictive power of the BLR model and its extensions has been compared with the one of other statistical modelling approaches (Random Forest, Neural Network, k-NN, Naïve Bayes). Results showed that role-based indicators substantially improved the performance of all the models used in both this work and in previous works available on Kaggle. The base BLR model increased prediction accuracy by 10 percentage points, and showed the importance of defence performances, especially in the last seasons. Inclusion of both ELO rating predictor and the random effects did not substantially improve prediction, as the simpler BLR model performed equally good. With respect to the other models, only Naïve Bayes showed more balanced results in predicting both win and no-win of the home team.

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Several Web and social media analytics require user geolocation data. Although Twitter is a powerful source for social media analytics, its user geolocation is a nontrivial task. This paper presents an purely word distribution method for Twitter user country geolocation. In particular, we focus on the frequencies of tweet nouns and their statistical matches with Google Trends world country distributions (GTN method). Several experiments were conducted, using a recently created dataset of 744,830 tweets produced by 3,298 users from 54 countries and written in 48 languages. Overall, the proposed GTN approach is competitive when compared with a state-of-the-art world distribution geolocation method. To reduce the number of Google Trends queries, we also tested a machine learning variant (GTN2) that is capable of matching the GTN responses with an 80% accuracy while being much faster than GTN.

Over the last decade, independent agencies, institutions and research centres (ISTAT-National Statistic Office, Ministry of Economic Development, Confcooperative Legacoop, Unioncamere) have provided studies on the evolution of the cooperative movement in the Third Sector in Italy in order to monitor the development of these organizations over time and to evaluate their economic and employment impact in the country. Following a similar path, this study analyzes the contribution of social cooperatives in Italy at a regional level, highlighting the differences related to their longevity and fields of activity. Moreover, the article evaluates the efficiency and profitability of the social cooperative by adopting principal component analysis to economic and financial indexes.

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