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

Understanding the Twitter API v1.1


APIs are both a blessing and a curse. Application Programming Interfaces make it much easier to gather data from services such as Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn and define exactly what data the company wants, and does not want, you to have. Unfortunately, companies set rate limits on accessing their APIs in order to control the frequency (and therefore, the amount) of data that can be harvested. They have also been known to radically alter their APIs from one version to the next, thus resulting in a great deal of code rewrites for all efforts dependent on the original API. Twitter's large API change from Version 1.0 to Version 1.1 offers a cautionary tale.

Twitter offers three main APIs: the search API, the REST API, and the streaming API. The search API gives us a programmatic method that makes queries to Twitter in order to retrieve historical content, namely tweets. The REST API offers access to Twitter's core features, including timelines, status updates...