It is estimated that 80% of the world’s data is unstructured. Thus deriving information from unstructured data is an essential part of data analysis. Text mining is the process of deriving valuable insights from unstructured text data, and sentiment analysis is one applicant of text mining. It is using natural language processing and machine learning techniques to understand and classify subjective emotions from text data. In business settings, sentiment analysis is widely used in understanding customer reviews, detecting spams from emails, etc. This article is the first part of the tutorial that introduces the specific techniques used to conduct sentiment analysis with Python. To illustrate the procedures better, I will use one of my projects as an example, where I conduct news sentiment analysis on WTI crude oil future prices. I will present the important steps along with the corresponded Python code.

#machine-learning #python #sentiment-analysis #text-mining #data-science