Book Image

Mastering Social Media Mining with R

Book Image

Mastering Social Media Mining with R

Overview of this book

With an increase in the number of users on the web, the content generated has increased substantially, bringing in the need to gain insights into the untapped gold mine that is social media data. For computational statistics, R has an advantage over other languages in providing readily-available data extraction and transformation packages, making it easier to carry out your ETL tasks. Along with this, its data visualization packages help users get a better understanding of the underlying data distributions while its range of "standard" statistical packages simplify analysis of the data. This book will teach you how powerful business cases are solved by applying machine learning techniques on social media data. You will learn about important and recent developments in the field of social media, along with a few advanced topics such as Open Authorization (OAuth). Through practical examples, you will access data from R using APIs of various social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, GitHub, Foursquare, LinkedIn, Blogger, and other networks. We will provide you with detailed explanations on the implementation of various use cases using R programming. With this handy guide, you will be ready to embark on your journey as an independent social media analyst.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Mastering Social Media Mining with R
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 5. Let's Build Software with GitHub

GitHub is a Web-based Git repository hosting service and it offers distributed revision control, source code management functionality of Git, and much more. GitHub supports both private and public repositories. There are a vast number of public projects in GitHub to which contributions come from multiple people around the world. GitHub provides an API to access their data; the public data can be accessed by anyone whereas the private data can be accessed only by authorized users.

In this chapter, we will see how to access the public data of GitHub using its API from R, and we will see how to perform Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) and mine significant patterns from the GitHub data extracted by us. As a part of this chapter, we will cover different methods to extract the data from GitHub and various graphical and non-graphical EDA techniques.

The objectives of this chapter are to show how to extract the public data from GitHub and focus on getting...