Book Image

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data

By : Megan Squire
Book Image

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data

By: Megan Squire

Overview of this book

Data mining is an integral part of the data science pipeline. It is the foundation of any successful data-driven strategy – without it, you'll never be able to uncover truly transformative insights. Since data is vital to just about every modern organization, it is worth taking the next step to unlock even greater value and more meaningful understanding. If you already know the fundamentals of data mining with Python, you are now ready to experiment with more interesting, advanced data analytics techniques using Python's easy-to-use interface and extensive range of libraries. In this book, you'll go deeper into many often overlooked areas of data mining, including association rule mining, entity matching, network mining, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization, topic modeling, and anomaly detection. For each data mining technique, we'll review the state-of-the-art and current best practices before comparing a wide variety of strategies for solving each problem. We will then implement example solutions using real-world data from the domain of software engineering, and we will spend time learning how to understand and interpret the results we get. By the end of this book, you will have solid experience implementing some of the most interesting and relevant data mining techniques available today, and you will have achieved a greater fluency in the important field of Python data analytics.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Data Mining with Python – Find patterns hidden in your data
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The basics of sentiment analysis


To begin a sentiment mining project, we first need to understand how opinions are structured in text so we can find the best way to train the computer to deal with them. Opinion mining and sentiment analysis are considered sub-problems of the much larger field of natural language processing (NLP), and as such, are subject to many of the same unsolved issues in trying to account for all the quirks of human communication. However, sentiment mining is restricted in an important way, namely that its goal is not to understand the statements made by people, but rather to just figure out their tone. As we will see later, any one strategy for finding the sentiment of any given text may not be perfect, but this may not matter much if the amount of data is high and the stakes are comparatively low.

The structure of an opinion

Each opinion typically has a target. If we read the sentence, "This was the worst movie I ever saw," the target of that opinion is the movie. In...