Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By : Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta
Book Image

Practical Data Science Cookbook

By: Tony Ojeda, Sean Patrick Murphy, Benjamin Bengfort, Abhijit Dasgupta

Overview of this book

<p>As increasing amounts of data is generated each year, the need to analyze and operationalize it is more important than ever. Companies that know what to do with their data will have a competitive advantage over companies that don't, and this will drive a higher demand for knowledgeable and competent data professionals.</p> <p>Starting with the basics, this book will cover how to set up your numerical programming environment, introduce you to the data science pipeline (an iterative process by which data science projects are completed), and guide you through several data projects in a step-by-step format. By sequentially working through the steps in each chapter, you will quickly familiarize yourself with the process and learn how to apply it to a variety of situations with examples in the two most popular programming languages for data analysis—R and Python.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Practical Data Science Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


In this chapter, we are going to dive into the world of social media analysis through the use of RESTful web-service APIs. Twitter is a microblogging social network whose stream is invaluable for data mining, particularly text mining, and they have an excellent API that we will learn how to interact with via Python. We will use the API to fetch Twitter social connections and collect and store JSON data using both traditional file storage and the popular NoSQL database, MongoDB[SK1]. Our analysis will attempt to ascertain the geographic location of connections and produce a visualization from the data. Throughout the chapter, you should begin to notice patterns about how APIs are designed and their intended use. Interaction with APIs is an extremely important data science topic, and having a solid understanding of them will unlock a whole new world of data upon which you can perform a myriad of analyses.

API stands for Application Programming Interface, and in traditional computer...