Forem: elsie-n

Detecting Fake News with Python and Machine Learning

elsie-n — Wed, 04 May 2022 13:43:52 +0000

We consume news through several mediums throughout the day in our daily routine, but sometimes it becomes difficult to decide which one is fake and which one is authentic not every piece of news that we consume is not real.

Terminologies

-Fake News
A sort of sensationalist reporting, counterfeit news embodies bits of information that might be lies and is, for the most part, spread through web-based media and other online media.
This is regularly done to further or force certain kinds of thoughts or for false promotion of products and is frequently accomplished with political plans.

-Tfidf Vectorizer
TF(Term Frequency)
These are the number of times a word is present in a document. Large values mean that a word is present so many times with respect to other words.

IDF(Inverse Document Frequency)
IDF is a proportion of how critical a term is in the whole corpus of data.

Project

To detect fake news and real news. Using sklearn, we build a TfidfVectorizer on our dataset. Then, we initialize a PassiveAggressive Classifier and fit the model. In the end, the accuracy score and the confusion matrix tell us how well our model fares.

PassiveAggressive
Passive Aggressive algorithms are online learning algorithms. Such an algorithm remains passive for a correct classification outcome, and turns aggressive in the event of a miscalculation, updating and adjusting. Unlike most other algorithms, it does not converge.

Data Analysis

The data set used can be found [(url)]

This dataset has four columns,

unnamed
title
text
label

Libraries

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import itertools
from sklearn.model_selection import train_test_split
from sklearn.feature_extraction.text import TfidfVectorizer
from sklearn.linear_model import PassiveAggressiveClassifier
from sklearn.metrics import accuracy_score, confusion_matrix

The output is in form of a vector;
confusion_matrix(y_test,y_pred, labels=['FAKE','REAL'])
Fake=True Real=False

Link to the project code
[(https://github.com/elsie-n/FakeNews/tree/main)]

Mastering Python for Web Development.

elsie-n — Wed, 04 May 2022 07:13:50 +0000

Web Development is loosely defined as building, creating, and maintaining websites. It involves a frontend, everything that interacts with the client, and a backend, which contains business logic and interacts with a database.

Advantages of using python for web development

Wide spread popularity
Python is one of the most popular languages in the world, with communities from all over the world it provides extensive support and framework for one to begin their developer journey.
Easy to learn
Python is popular among first time learners since it has lower barrier to entry since the code is easily understood.The language relies on common expressions and whitespace, which allows you to write significantly less code compared to some other languages like Java or C++.
Rich ecosystem and libraries
Python offers a vast range of library tools and packages, which allows you to access much pre-written code, streamlining your application development time.
Large Community
Python has a large community of developers using it, which is because of its wide acceptance. This makes it easy for beginners
who have questions. Moreover, the issues that developers face when developing applications are either already resolved or will be resolved quickly as there are a large number of developers who are willing to help.
Fast,Powerful & Productive
User friendly runs everywhere
More Versatile than PHP
Readable Flexible & Secure
Extensible & Intergrable

Python Web Framework

A framework is a collection of pre-written packages and modules that supports the development of web applications, making development faster and easier, and your programs more reliable and scalable.

Python is mostly used for building the backend. Python frameworks take care of dealing with tasks that are related to backend application development, such as parsing HTTP requests, generating HTTP responses, accessing the database, authentication, authorization, etc.
Some of the popular python web frameworks include;

Django Is a Python web framework that offers an open-source, high-level framework that “encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.” It’s fast, secure, and scalable. Django offers strong community support and detailed documentation.

One of the reasons for Django’s popularity is that it is quite easy to learn and use, especially because of its pluggable architecture. Django allows you to build small decoupled apps that can be included or plugged into larger projects. In Django, you get apps and projects, where an app is a small self-contained codebase, while a project is a collection of multiple apps.

Flask It is a microframework meaning, it does not have a lot of features baked into it that the other web frameworks might have, such as templating, account authorization, authentication, etc.

Flask is minimalistic and lightweight, meaning that you add extensions and libraries that you need as you code without automatically being provided with it by the framework.

Pyramid
Web2Py
Turbogears
CherryPy

The framework one chooses is dependent on your skill level as a web developer:

If you are quite experienced, consider developing your program with something more “barebones”;Flask.You can also use it if you know a few libraries and only need a framework to deal with common webserver tasks such as HTTP communication, request parsing, etc.

For a developer with not much experience in web development or if you are tackling a big project and do not wish to deal with annoying low-level details, then Django is the right choice for you. You can also use it if you do not wish to deal with managing individual packages and integrating them later as Django comes with many packages by default

Python Libraries

Some useful Python libraries for web development to keep note of:

If you ever need a web crawler to extract data for your application, Scrapy is great for that. It’s a widely used library for scraping, data mining, automated testing, and more.
Zappa is a powerful library for developing a serverless application on AWS Lambda.
Requests is a library that allows you to send HTTP requests easily, which is used to communicate with an application, allowing you to get HTML pages or data, for example.
Another useful library is Dash, which helps those developing web applications that have to do with data visualization. Built on top of Flask, it offers features like charts, graphs, dashboards, and more.

Introduction to Python

elsie-n — Wed, 27 Apr 2022 08:22:42 +0000

What is python?
Python is a high-level, general purpose, interpreted programming language meaning:

It is easy to learn
Can be used in various domains, i.e web applications,automation,data science, machine learning and AI, the targeted language like SQL which can be used for querying data from relational databases.
It is an interpreted language,turns the source code, line by line, once at a time, into the machine code.

Why Python

Python increases your productivity. Python allows you to solve complex problems in less time and fewer lines of code. It’s quick to make a prototype in Python.
Python becomes a solution in many areas across industries, from web applications to data science and machine learning.
Python is quite easy to learn in comparison with other programming languages. Python syntax is clear and beautiful.
Python has a large ecosystem that includes lots of libraries and frameworks.
Python is cross-platform. Python programs can run on Windows, Linux, and macOS.
Python has a huge community. Whenever you get stuck, you can get help from an active community.
Python developers are in high demand.

Installation
To download the latest version click [(https://www.python.org/downloads/)], run the program and install.

Python Basics
Fundamentals

Whitespaces and Indentations

Unlike other programming languages ,Python uses whitespace and indentation to construct the code structure to separate statements instead of single colon(;)
This whitespaces should be uniform otherwise an error occurs while running the code.

def studentcode():
    i = 1
    max = 10
    while (i < max):
        print(i)
        i = i + 1

# call function studentcode 
studentcode()

Comments

Comments are part of the code that does not get executed rather are as important since they describe why a piece of code was written.
In Python there are two ways of writing comments :
a single line comment begins with a hash (#) symbol followed by the comment.
# call function studentcode
multiline comments (""" comment """)

"""
def studentcode():
    i = 1
    max = 10
    while (i < max):
        print(i)
        i = i + 1

# call function studentcode 
studentcode()"""

Identifiers

This are names that identify variables, functions, modules, classes, and other objects in Python, they are case sensitive and cannot use keywords.
some features to consider while choosing variables(containers for storing data values) include;

Variable names are case sensitive;studentcode is different from Studentcode
A variable name can only contain alphanumeric characters and underscores.
A variable name cannot start with a number, it must start with a letters or an underscore character.
Variable names cannot contain spaces. To separate words in variables, you use underscores.
String variables are declared either by using a single/double quotes. code = 'studentcode' code = "studentcode" Bonus Too get the data type of a variable

type ()function
 code = 56
print(type(code))

Strings

strings are declared using single or double quotes.
To concatenate strings use (+)

print "This is" +" a good string"

To access a specific element in a string use index of that particular string

str = "Python String"
print(str[0]) # P
print(str[1]) # y

+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
| P | y | t | h | o | n |   | S | t | r | i | n | g | 
+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+---+
  0   1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   10  11  12
-12  -11  -10 -9  -8  -7  -6  -5  -4  -3  -2  -1   0

To get the length of a string, you use the len() function.

str = "Python String"
str_len = len(str)
print(str_len)

Numbers

Python supports integers int(),float float() and complex numbers.
There are different types of operations;
Arithmetic Operators
Comparison Operators
Logical Operators
The different Arithmetic operators used include :

print(5 + 2)  # 7 (addition)
print(5 - 2)  # 3 (subtraction)
print(5 * 2)  # 10 (multiplication)
print(5 / 2.0)  # 2.5 (division)
print(2 ** 8)  # 256 (exponent)
print(5 % 2)  # 1 (remainder of the division)
print(5 // 2)  # 2 (floor division)

notice to get float when dividing you should indicate either of the numbers as a float type or both,i.e

print(5 / 2.0)  # 2.5 float
print(5.0 / 2.0)  # 2.5 float
print float(5)/2 #2.5 float

Also some of the different Comparison operators include;
Equal to (==)
Not equal to (!=)
less than (<)
Less than or equal to (<=)
Greater than (>)
Greater than or equal to (>=)

Logical operators are and/or/not;

And checks if both the statements are true
Or checks if either of the statements is true
Not which gives the opposite of the given condition.

a = 5 
    b = 2 
# True if both conditions are true  
print(a > 3 and a < 7)  

# True if one condition is true  
print(a > 6 or b < 7)  

# True if given condition is false (inverse of given condition)  
print(not(a > 3))

Boolean

Checks if a statement given a condition is true or false .

x = "Elsie"
if a is "Elsie" 
   ("true")
 else 
 print "False"

List
Python uses the square brackets ([]) to indicate a list and a comma(,) to separate the elements in the list.

students = ['Elsie', 'Judy', 'Lawrence']
To get rid of the quotes and commas while printing

students = ['Elsie', 'Judy', 'Lawrence']
 print "".join(students)
#or 
 print "...".join(students)

Tuple
Tuples are just like lists, but immutable (cannot be modified). They are surrounded by ()
students = ('Elsie', 'Judy', 'Lawrence')

Dictionaries
A Python dictionary is a collection of key-value pairs where each key is associated with a value. Python uses the curly braces {} to define a dictionary. Inside the curly braces, you can place zero, one, or many key-value pairs.

person = {
    'first_name': 'John',
    'last_name': 'Doe',
    'age': 25,
    'favorite_colors': ['blue', 'green'],
    'active': True
}
print(person['first_name']) #retrieves the first name
print(person['last_name']) #retrieves the last name

Control flow
Some of the control flow options include:

if statements; if statement if…else statement nested if if ladder
for loop
while loop
break & clause
ternary operator

if statement
There are different kinds of if statements

if statement This checks if a statement satisfies one condition and prints.

student_mark = input('Enter your marks:')
  if int(student_marks) >= 60:
    print("pass")

if…else Use the if...else statement when you want to run another code block if the condition is not True.

student_mark = input('Enter your marks:')
  if int(student_marks) >= 60:
    print("pass")
  else 
    print ("fail")

for loop
The for loop enables you to execute a block of code multiple times.

for index in range(n):
    statement

The index is called a loop counter .And n is the number of times that the loop will execute the statement.

While loop
While statement allows you to execute a code block repeatedly as long as a condition is True, checks the condition at the beginning of each iteration

max = 5
counter = 0

while counter < max:
    print(counter)
    counter += 1

Break
While using the if or loop statements one would want to terminate prematurely to do this use break

break

Functions
A function is a named code block that performs a job or returns a value. This enables one to perform a task multiple times without rewriting the code all over again. Use def to define a new function.

def students():