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Home / Proceedings / Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media

Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose

February 1, 2023

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Authors

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley

Arizona State University,Carnegie Mellon University,Arizona State University,Carnegie Mellon University


DOI:

10.1609/icwsm.v7i1.14401


Abstract:

Twitter is a social media giant famous for the exchange of short, 140-character messages called "tweets". In the scientific community, the microblogging site is known for openness in sharing its data. It provides a glance into its millions of users and billions of tweets through a "Streaming API" which provides a sample of all tweets matching some parameters preset by the API user. The API service has been used by many researchers, companies, and governmental institutions that want to extract knowledge in accordance with a diverse array of questions pertaining to social media. The essential drawback of the Twitter API is the lack of documentation concerning what and how much data users get. This leads researchers to question whether the sampled data is a valid representation of the overall activity on Twitter. In this work we embark on answering this question by comparing data collected using Twitter's sampled API service with data collected using the full, albeit costly, Firehose stream that includes every single published tweet. We compare both datasets using common statistical metrics as well as metrics that allow us to compare topics, networks, and locations of tweets. The results of our work will help researchers and practitioners understand the implications of using the Streaming API.

Topics: ICWSM

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HOW TO CITE:

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (2013) 400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose ICWSM 2013, 400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley (2013). Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley. Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media 2013 p.400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley. 2013. Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose. "Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media". 400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley. (2013) "Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose", Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, p.400-408

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley, "Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose", ICWSM, p.400-408, 2013.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley. "Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 2013, p.400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley. "Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose". Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, (2013): 400-408.

Fred Morstatter,Jürgen Pfeffer,Huan Liu,Kathleen Carley. Is the Sample Good Enough? Comparing Data from Twitter’s Streaming API with Twitter’s Firehose. ICWSM[Internet]. 2013[cited 2023]; 400-408.


ISSN: 2334-0770


Published by AAAI Press, Palo Alto, California USA
Copyright 2022, Association for the Advancement of
Artificial Intelligence 1900 Embarcadero Road, Suite
101, Palo Alto, California 94303 All Rights Reserved

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