Chapter 2: What is your question?#
Before going any further in this QuantGov tutorial, it is important to address the question at hand, what is your question? There are so many different ways the QuantGov library can be used, but the focus can be narrowed by properly defining the end you are trying to reach. To better define this end, let’s start by answering a few questions.
Do you have documents that you are looking to analyze?
Yes: You are in the right place. The QuantGov library specializes in analyzing documents.
No: Are you looking to collect documents to be analyzed? If so then you might want to check out this beginner’s guide to web scraping with Python. Many documents can also be downloaded in bulk or through a website’s API.
Do you have documents but you are not sure what to do with them?
Check out the chapter 3, which discusses how to make an official QuantGov corpus. From there you can do a variety of different analyses.
Are you looking to use NLP or other non-machine learning analyzes?
First check out chapter 3, which discusses how to make an official QuantGov corpus. From there check out chapter 4 on NLP.
Are you looking to create a custom machine learning algorithm to retrieve latent data from your documents?
First check out chapter 3, which discusses how to make an official QuantGov corpus. From there check out the chapter 5 on how to make an estimator (machine learning algorithm).
Are you looking to analyze your data in a jupyter notebook and with some data visualizations?
Check out chapter 6, which discusses visualizing data.