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Twitter Data Mining: A Guide to Big Data Analytics Using Python

Whether you’re a businessman trying to catch up to the times or a coding prodigy looking for their next project, this tutorial will give you a brief overview of what big data is. You will learn how it’s applicable to you, and how you can get started quickly through the Twitter API and Python.

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Dear friends,
with this article we are continuing our collaboration with Toptal. Toptal is an exclusive network that aims to connect the top freelance software developers, designers, and finance experts in the world to top companies for their most important projects.
The article is authored by Anthony Sistilli and was originally published in Toptal’s blog.

Big data is everywhere. Period. In the process of running a successful business in today’s day and age, you’re likely going to run into it whether you like it or not.

Whether you’re a businessman trying to catch up to the times or a coding prodigy looking for their next project, this tutorial will give you a brief overview of what big data is. You will learn how it’s applicable to you, and how you can get started quickly through the Twitter API and Python.

What Is Big Data?

Big data is exactly what it sounds like—a lot of data. Alone, a single point of data can’t give you much insight. But terabytes of data, combined together with complex mathematical models and boisterous computing power, can create insights human beings aren’t capable of producing. The value that big data Analytics provides to a business is intangible and surpassing human capabilities each and every day.

The first step to big data analytics is gathering the data itself. This is known as “data mining.” Data can come from anywhere. Most businesses deal with gigabytes of user, product, and location data. In this tutorial, we’ll be exploring how we can use data mining techniques to gather Twitter data, which can be more useful than you might think.

For example, let’s say you run Facebook, and want to use Messenger data to provide insights on how you can advertise to your audience better. Messenger has 1.2 billion monthly active users. In this case, the big data are conversations between users. If you were to individually read the conversations of each user, you would be able to get a good sense of what they like, and be able to recommend products to them accordingly. Using a machine learning technique known as Natural Language Processing (NLP), you can do this on a large scale with the entire process automated and left up to machines.

This is just one of the countless examples of how machine learning and big data analytics can add value to your company.

Why Twitter data?

Twitter is a gold mine of data. Unlike other social platforms, almost every user’s tweets are completely public and pullable. This is a huge plus if you’re trying to get a large amount of data to run analytics on. Twitter data is also pretty specific. Twitter’s API allows you to do complex queries like pulling every tweet about a certain topic within the last twenty minutes, or pull a certain user’s non-retweeted tweets.

A simple application of this could be analyzing how your company is received in the general public. You could collect the last 2,000 tweets that mention your company (or any term you like), and run a sentiment analysis algorithm over it.

We can also target users that specifically live in a certain location, which is known as spatial data. Another application of this could be to map the areas on the globe where your company has been mentioned the most.

As you can see, Twitter data can be a large door into the insights of the general public, and how they receive a topic. That, combined with the openness and the generous rate limiting of Twitter’s API, can produce powerful results.

Tools Overview

We’ll be using Python 2.7 for these examples. Ideally, you should have an IDE to write this code in. I will be using PyCharm – Community Edition.

To connect to Twitter’s API, we will be using a Python library called Tweepy, which we’ll install in a bit.

Getting Started

Twitter Developer Account

In order to use Twitter’s API, we have to create a developer account on the Twitter apps site.

  1. Log in or make a Twitter account at https://apps.twitter.com/.
  2. Create a new app (button on the top right)
  3. Fill in the app creation page with a unique name, a website name (use a placeholder website if you don’t have one), and a project description. Accept the terms and conditions and proceed to the next page.
  4. Once your project has been created, click on the “Keys and Access Tokens” tab. You should now be able to see your consumer secret and consumer key.
  5. You’ll also need a pair of access tokens. Scroll down and request those tokens. The page should refresh, and you should now have an access token and access token secret.
    We’ll need all of these later, so make sure you keep this tab open.

    Installing Tweepy

    Tweepy is an excellently supported tool for accessing the Twitter API. It supports Python 2.6, 2.7, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, and 3.6. There are a couple of different ways to install Tweepy. The easiest way is using pip.

    Using Pip

    Simply type pip install tweepy into your terminal.

    Using GitHub

    You can follow the instructions on Tweepy’s GitHub repository. The basic steps are as follows:

    git clone https://github.com/tweepy/tweepy.git cd tweepy python setup.py install 

    You can troubleshoot any installation issues there as well.

    Authenticating

    Now that we have the necessary tools ready, we can start coding! The baseline of each application we’ll build today requires using Tweepy to create an API object which we can call functions with. In order create the API object, however, we must first authenticate ourselves with our developer information.

    First, let’s import Tweepy and add our own authentication information.

    import tweepy consumer_key = "wXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX1" consumer_secret = "qXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXh" access_token = "9XXXXXXXX-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXi" access_token_secret = "kXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXT" 

    Now it’s time to create our API object.

    # Creating the authentication object auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret) # Setting your access token and secret auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret) # Creating the API object while passing in auth information api = tweepy.API(auth)  

    This will be the basis of every application we build, so make sure you don’t delete it.

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