Being up to date on relevant news can be a daunting task in this information era. Everything from Elon Musk’s new initiatives to Kardashians’ new make-up lines can be overwhelming for any average human being to absorb. But excess availability of information doesn’t necessarily mean that we should just give up watching the news entirely. Rather, we should constantly try to gather and comprehend information that we think would be valuable to us from reliable sources on a daily basis. This is why Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media giants hire data scientists to find out what exactly their users prefer to see on their feed to enhance their experience rather than flooding them with everything based on general popularity which would be highly ineffective in user retention. Therefore every time you make a decision as to whether to watch something or not, even simply to click on a post or not, you are unknowingly helping them to get to know you better (In a less creepy context, making their algorithm more accurate). Also, if you are currently having an identity crisis, I suggest you go to your YouTube home page and let it tell you exactly what kind of a person you are and your interests. And whether you like it or not, you can be very well certain that it’s not completely wrong.

In this article, I will share a technique to manually build a system that sends yourself/others summarized articles of topics that interests you, using R. Consider this as your first step in taking control of what kind of information you receive through out the day. For that, I chose the website ‘MarketWatch’ which is a site that provides the latest stock market, financial and business news. In doing so, we’ll be using a package called ‘rvest’, which is a package that was built to easily scrape data from html web pages.

Let’s get started.

#r #fintech #machine-learning #finance