Statistical analysis

In this section, we will try to understand some review data and check whether there are any differences between genuine and fake reviews. We will use the Amazon fake reviews dataset that Amazon has published on Kaggle. It is a set of around 20,000 reviews with associated labels (real or fake) as labeled by domain experts at Amazon.

Exploratory data analysis

We will first load up the data and take a first pass over it to understand the features and their distribution.

We begin by importing the necessary libraries:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

We will then read the reviews data. Although it is a text file, it is structured and therefore can be read with the read_csv function in Pandas:

reviews_df = pd.read_csv("amazon_reviews.txt", sep="\t")
reviews_df.head()

This is what the output should look like:

Figure 4.1 – A glimpse of the reviews dataset

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