Data Science Capstone - Milestone Report

1. Introduction

The goal of this project is to build a next-word prediction algorithm using large English text datasets provided by SwiftKey. This milestone report covers:

Loading and summarizing the data
Basic exploratory analysis
Plans for the prediction algorithm and Shiny app

2. Loading the Data

# Load all three datasets
twitter <- readLines("en_US.twitter.txt", encoding = "UTF-8", warn = FALSE)
blogs   <- readLines("en_US.blogs.txt",   encoding = "UTF-8", warn = FALSE)
news    <- readLines("en_US.news.txt",     encoding = "UTF-8", warn = FALSE)

cat("Data loaded successfully!\n")

## Data loaded successfully!

3. Basic Summary Statistics

library(knitr)

# Word count function
count_words <- function(lines) {
  sum(sapply(strsplit(lines, "\\s+"), length))
}

# Build summary table
summary_df <- data.frame(
  Dataset     = c("Twitter", "Blogs", "News"),
  Lines       = c(length(twitter), length(blogs), length(news)),
  Words       = c(count_words(twitter), count_words(blogs), count_words(news)),
  Max_Chars   = c(max(nchar(twitter)), max(nchar(blogs)), max(nchar(news))),
  Mean_Chars  = round(c(mean(nchar(twitter)), mean(nchar(blogs)), mean(nchar(news))), 1)
)

kable(summary_df,
      col.names = c("Dataset", "Total Lines", "Total Words",
                    "Max Characters", "Avg Characters per Line"),
      format.args = list(big.mark = ","))

Dataset	Total Lines	Total Words	Max Characters	Avg Characters per Line
Twitter	2,360,148	30,373,543	140	68.7
Blogs	899,288	37,334,131	40,833	230.0
News	1,010,206	34,371,031	11,384	201.2

Key observations:

The Twitter dataset has the most lines (over 2 million) but shortest average line length due to the 140-character limit.
The Blogs dataset has the longest individual lines (over 40,000 characters).
The News dataset is the most formal in tone and structure.

4. Sampling the Data

Since the full datasets are very large, we work with a random 1% sample for exploratory analysis.

set.seed(42)

sample_data <- function(lines, prob = 0.001) {
  lines[rbinom(length(lines), 1, prob) == 1]
}

twitter_sample <- sample_data(twitter)
blogs_sample   <- sample_data(blogs)
news_sample    <- sample_data(news)

# Combine all samples
all_text <- c(twitter_sample, blogs_sample, news_sample)

cat("Sample sizes:\n")

## Sample sizes:

cat("Twitter:", length(twitter_sample), "lines\n")

## Twitter: 2271 lines

cat("Blogs:  ", length(blogs_sample),   "lines\n")

## Blogs:   903 lines

cat("News:   ", length(news_sample),    "lines\n")

## News:    949 lines

5. Tokenization and Word Frequencies

library(tm)
library(ggplot2)

# Build a corpus from sample
corpus <- VCorpus(VectorSource(all_text))

# Clean the corpus
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, content_transformer(tolower))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removePunctuation)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeNumbers)
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, removeWords, stopwords("en"))
corpus <- tm_map(corpus, stripWhitespace)

# Term-document matrix
tdm  <- TermDocumentMatrix(corpus)
mat  <- as.matrix(tdm)
freq <- sort(rowSums(mat), decreasing = TRUE)

# Top 20 words
top20 <- data.frame(word = names(freq[1:20]), count = freq[1:20])

ggplot(top20, aes(x = reorder(word, count), y = count)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", fill = "steelblue") +
  coord_flip() +
  labs(title = "Top 20 Most Frequent Words",
       x = "Word", y = "Frequency") +
  theme_minimal()

6. N-gram Analysis

N-grams (sequences of N words) are the foundation of our prediction algorithm.

library(RWeka)

# Bigram tokenizer
bigram_tok  <- function(x) NGramTokenizer(x, Weka_control(min=2, max=2))
trigram_tok <- function(x) NGramTokenizer(x, Weka_control(min=3, max=3))

# Bigrams
bigram_tdm  <- TermDocumentMatrix(corpus, control=list(tokenize=bigram_tok))
bigram_mat  <- as.matrix(bigram_tdm)
bigram_freq <- sort(rowSums(bigram_mat), decreasing=TRUE)
top_bigrams <- data.frame(ngram=names(bigram_freq[1:15]), count=bigram_freq[1:15])

# Trigrams
trigram_tdm  <- TermDocumentMatrix(corpus, control=list(tokenize=trigram_tok))
trigram_mat  <- as.matrix(trigram_tdm)
trigram_freq <- sort(rowSums(trigram_mat), decreasing=TRUE)
top_trigrams <- data.frame(ngram=names(trigram_freq[1:15]), count=trigram_freq[1:15])

ggplot(top_bigrams, aes(x = reorder(ngram, count), y = count)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", fill = "darkorange") +
  coord_flip() +
  labs(title = "Top 15 Bigrams", x = "Bigram", y = "Frequency") +
  theme_minimal()

ggplot(top_trigrams, aes(x = reorder(ngram, count), y = count)) +
  geom_bar(stat = "identity", fill = "darkgreen") +
  coord_flip() +
  labs(title = "Top 15 Trigrams", x = "Trigram", y = "Frequency") +
  theme_minimal()

7. Interesting Findings

# Word coverage analysis
total_words  <- sum(freq)
cum_freq     <- cumsum(freq) / total_words

words_50pct  <- which(cum_freq >= 0.50)[1]
words_90pct  <- which(cum_freq >= 0.90)[1]

cat("Unique words needed to cover 50% of text:", words_50pct, "\n")

## Unique words needed to cover 50% of text: 973

cat("Unique words needed to cover 90% of text:", words_90pct, "\n")

## Unique words needed to cover 90% of text: 9435

Key findings:

A small number of words cover a large proportion of all text — consistent with Zipf’s Law.
Only ~973 unique words are needed to cover 50% of the text.
Twitter text is noisier (slang, abbreviations, hashtags) compared to blogs and news.
Stop words (the, and, is) dominate raw frequency counts — removing them reveals more meaningful patterns.

8. Plan for Prediction Algorithm

The next-word prediction model will use an N-gram backoff approach:

Step	Description
1	Build unigram, bigram, trigram frequency tables from cleaned corpus
2	Given user input, look up matching trigrams first
3	If no trigram match, back off to bigrams
4	If no bigram match, return most common unigrams
5	Apply Katz backoff or Stupid Backoff smoothing

9. Plan for Shiny App

The Shiny app will:

Accept user text input in a text box
Display the top 3 predicted next words in real time
Show a simple word frequency chart
Be fast and lightweight using pre-computed n-gram lookup tables

10. Next Steps

Build full n-gram tables on the complete dataset (not just 1% sample)
Handle out-of-vocabulary words gracefully
Implement and benchmark the backoff algorithm
Deploy the Shiny app on shinyapps.io

Report prepared for the Coursera Data Science Capstone — Johns Hopkins University