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Collect Ethically: Reduce Bias in Twitter Datasets

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Information Management and Big Data (SIMBig 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1070))

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Abstract

The Twitter platform is appealing to researchers due to the ease of obtaining data and the ability to analyze and produce results rapidly. However, sampling Twitter data for research purposes needs to be regulated to produce unbiased results. In this paper, factors that lead to sampling bias are addressed, case studies that have been encountered are presented, and an approach is proposed to reduce sampling bias and flaws in datasets collected from Twitter. Then, experiments are conducted on two case studies, and a larger dataset is achieved by following the proposed guideline. The results indicate that using multiple Twitter application programming interfaces (APIs) for data collection is the best way to obtain a randomly sampled dataset.

L. Alkulaib and A. Alhamadani — Equally contributed to this work.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    www.hashtagify.com.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/DocNow/hydrator.

  3. 3.

    https://github.com/Jefferson-Henrique/GetOldTweets-python.

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Correspondence to Lulwah Alkulaib or Abdulaziz Alhamadani .

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Alkulaib, L., Alhamadani, A., Ji, T., Lu, CT. (2020). Collect Ethically: Reduce Bias in Twitter Datasets. In: Lossio-Ventura, J.A., Condori-Fernandez, N., Valverde-Rebaza, J.C. (eds) Information Management and Big Data. SIMBig 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1070. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46140-9_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46140-9_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-46139-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-46140-9

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