Data Access API Research Articles

SCUBA implements a storage format-agnostic API for single-cell data access in R

While robust tools exist for the analysis of single-cell datasets in both Python and R, interoperability is limited, and analysis tools generally only accept one object class. Considerable programming expertise is required to integrate tools across package ecosystems into a comprehensive analysis, due to their differing languages and internal data structures. This complicates validation of results and leads to inconsistent visualizations between analysis suites. Conversion between object formats is the most common solution, but this is difficult and error-prone due to the rapid pace of development of the analysis suites and their underlying data structures. To address this, we created SCUBA (Single-Cell Unified Backend API), an R package that implements a unified data access API for all common R and Python single-cell object formats. SCUBA extends the data access approach from the widely used Seurat package to SingleCellExperiment and anndata objects. SCUBA also implements new data-specific access functions for all supported object types. Performance scales well across all SCUBA-supported formats. In addition to performance, SCUBA offers several advantages over object conversion for the visualization and further analysis of pre-processed single-cell data. First, SCUBA extracts only data required for the operation at hand, leaving the original object unmodified. This process is simpler, less error prone, and less memory intensive than object conversion, which operates on the entire dataset. Second, code written with SCUBA can use any supported object class as input, with simple and consistent syntax across object formats. This allows a single analysis script or package (like our interactive single-cell browser, scExploreR) to work seamlessly with multiple object types, reducing the complexity of the code and improving both readability and reproducibility. Adoption of SCUBA will ultimately improve collaboration and reproducible research in single-cell analysis by lowering the barriers between package ecosystems.

A survey of machine learning based techniques for hate speech detection on Twitter

The use of the Internet and social networks for communication has significantly increased in recent years. Twitter is the third most popular worldwide Online Social Network (OSN), only after Facebook and Instagram. Compared to other OSNs, Twitter presents a simpler data model and more straightforward data access API, making it a valuable tool for studying and analyzing online behavior, including abusive patterns. This survey attempts to create a machine learning-based guide for automatic hate speech classification, including a description of Twitter's technology and terminology, social graphs, sentiment analysis concepts, and hate speech identification. This study also adopted a systematic literature review on the most advanced computing techniques involved with the subject, focusing on state-of-the-art machine learning and research directions.

Design and Implementation of Basic Data Platform for University Library

Considering the problems existing in the data management and use of university library, this paper puts forward the concept of constructing “basic data platform”, which can provide the guarantee for the production and business data of library and university. The system includes data acquisition system, library data exchange system, data access API interface, cold data transfer system, data visualization and management platform, data analysis and mining modules, forming a complete system of data storage, management and use.

A survey of Twitter research: Data model, graph structure, sentiment analysis and attacks

Twitter is the third most popular worldwide Online Social Network (OSN) after Facebook and Instagram. Compared to other OSNs, it has a simple data model and a straightforward data access API. This makes it ideal for social network studies attempting to analyze the patterns of online behavior, the structure of the social graph, the sentiment towards various entities and the nature of malicious attacks in a vivid network with hundreds of millions of users. Indeed, Twitter has been established as a major research platform, utilized in more than ten thousands research articles over the last ten years. Although there are excellent review and comparison studies for most of the research that utilizes Twitter, there are limited efforts to map this research terrain as a whole. Here we present an effort to map the current research topics in Twitter focusing on three major areas: the structure and properties of the social graph, sentiment analysis and threats such as spam, bots, fake news and hate speech. We also present Twitter’s basic data model and best practices for sampling and data access. This survey also lays the ground of computational techniques used in these areas such as Graph Sampling, Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. Along with existing reviews and comparison studies, we also discuss the key findings and the state of the art in these methods. Overall, we hope that this survey will help researchers create a clear conceptual model of Twitter and act as a guide to expand further the topics presented.

Sentiment Analysis of Investor Opinions on Twitter

The rapid growth of social networks has produced an unprecedented amount of user-generated data, which provides an excellent opportunity for text mining. Sentiment analysis, an important part of text mining, attempts to learn about the authors’ opinion on a text through its content and structure. Such information is particularly valuable for determining the overall opinion of a large number of people. Examples of the usefulness of this are predicting box office sales or stock prices. One of the most accessible sources of user-generated data is Twitter, which makes the majority of its user data freely available through its data access API. In this study we seek to predict a sentiment value for stock related tweets on Twitter, and demonstrate a correlation between this sentiment and the movement of a company’s stock price in a real time streaming environment. Both n-gram and “word2vec” textual representation techniques are used alongside a random forest classification algorithm to predict the sentiment of tweets. These values are then evaluated for correlation between stock prices and Twitter sentiment for that each company. There are significant correlations between price and sentiment for several individual companies. Some companies such as Microsoft and Walmart show strong positive correlation, while others such as Goldman Sachs and Cisco Systems show strong negative correlation. This suggests that consumer facing companies are affected differently than other companies. Overall this appears to be a promising field for future research.

Innesto: a multi-attribute searchable consistent key/value store

Key/value data storage systems serve as the fundamental component of scalable cloud-based services. However, the scalability of existing key/value datastores comes at the cost of a narrow data access API with relaxed data consistency. We present Innesto, a distributed key/value datastore that provides search as part of its API. Search allows data items to be retrieved based on constraints on multiple different attributes. Innesto’s strong consistency data model and its transactional interface bring much of the power of traditional relational databases to cloud-scale performance. Isolation between transactions can be performed using either traditional locks or using lock-free synchronisation based on clock vectors. Our evaluation of Innesto shows that it offers these extra features with competitive performance compared to an industrial key/value datastore such as Cassandra which offers an inferior feature set.

Cloud Platform Datastore Support

There are many datastore systems to choose from that differ in many ways including public versus private cloud support, data management interfaces, programming languages, supported feature sets, fault tolerance, consistency guarantees, configuration, and their deployment processes. In this paper, we focus on technologies for structured data access (database/datastore systems) in cloud systems. Our goal is to simplify the use of datastore systems through automation and to facilitate their empirical evaluation using real world applications. To enable this, we provide a cloud platform abstraction layer that decouples a data access API from its implementation. Applications that use this API can use any datastore that “plugs into” our abstraction layer, thus enabling application portability. We use this layer to extend the functionality of multiple datastores without modifying the datastores directly. Specifically, we provide support for ACID transaction semantics for popular key-value stores (none of which provide this feature). We integrate this layer into the AppScale cloud platform—an open-source cloud platform that executes cloud applications written in Python, Java, and Go, over virtualized cluster resources and infrastructures-as-a-service (Eucalyptus, OpenStack, and Amazon EC2). We use this system to investigate the impact of extending disparate datastores via the application portability layer with distributed transaction support.

Gender Prediction on Twitter Using Stream Algorithms with N-Gram Character Features

The rapid growth of social networks has produced an unprecedented amount of user-generated data, which provides an excellent opportunity for text mining. Authorship analysis, an important part of text mining, attempts to learn about the author of the text through subtle variations in the writing styles that occur between gender, age and social groups. Such information has a variety of applications including advertising and law enforcement. One of the most accessible sources of user-generated data is Twitter, which makes the majority of its user data freely available through its data access API. In this study we seek to identify the gender of users on Twitter using Perceptron and Nai ve Bayes with selected 1 through 5-gram features from tweet text. Stream applications of these algorithms were employed for gender prediction to handle the speed and volume of tweet traffic. Because informal text, such as tweets, cannot be easily evaluated using traditional dictionary methods, n-gram features were implemented in this study to represent streaming tweets. The large number of 1 through 5-grams requires that only a subset of them be used in gender classification, for this reason informative n-gram features were chosen using multiple selection algorithms. In the best case the Naive Bayes and Perceptron algorithms produced accuracy, balanced accuracy, and F-measure above 99%.

Analysis environments for CMS

The CMS offline software suite uses a layered approach to provide several different environments suitable for a wide range of analysis styles. At the heart of all the environments is the ROOT-based event data model file format. The simplest environment uses ‘bare’ ROOT to read files directly, without the use of any CMS-specific supporting libraries. This is useful for performing simple checks on a file or plotting simple distributions (such as the momentum distribution of tracks). The second environment supports use of the CMS framework's smart pointers that read data on demand, as well as automatic loading of the libraries holding the object interfaces. This environment fully supports interactive ROOT sessions in either CINT or PyROOT. The third environment combines ROOT's TSelector with the data access API of the full CMS framework, facilitating sharing of code between the ROOT environment and the full framework. The final environment is the full CMS framework that is used for all data production activities as well as full access to all data available on the Grid. By providing a layered approach to analysis environments, physicists can choose the environment that most closely matches their individual work style.