stats201-Shiran-PS2

Shiran Yuan’s STATS 201 Repository

This is Shiran Yuan’s repository for the course STATS 201.

Nota Bene: This page contains figures generated by matplotlib.pyplot, with transparent background. If you are viewing this on the rising-stars-by-sunshine.github.io website, it is suggested that you use light mode instead of dark mode for best viewing experience.

Table of Contents

• Bio
• Project Information
• Data
• Code
• Spotlights
• Conclusions

Bio

Shiran Yuan was born on September 2007. He dropped out of primary school during second grade in 2016 (age 8) after receiving a scholarship, and began self-studying since then.

In 2017 (age 9) he received IELTS band 7.

In 2018 (age 10), he completed the Shing-Tung Yau Mathcamp course at Tsinghua University, received Honor Roll of Distinction in the Second Round of the Mathematics League Competition (Grades 9-12 Track), earned High Honors in the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth’s Talent Search Program, received a TOEFL score of 109, and was awarded the AP Scholar with Honor Award from the CollegeBoard.

In 2019 (age 11), he received the AP Scholar with Distinction Award from the CollegeBoard and a DELF B2 (French language) certificate.

In 2020 (age 12), he completed the Hsue-Shen Tsien Excellence in Engineering Program Summer Camp course at Tsinghua University.

In 2021 (age 13), he was admitted to DKU with a full scholarship, and received the top prize at X-Institute (an academic research institution founded by Tsinghua University) Summer Camp.

In 2022 (age 14), he became an X-Institute Scholar, and received the Silver Medal in the iGEM Competition.

His current intended major is Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences (Computer Science Track).

Project Information

In this problem set, I am going to explore tweets about data privacy/security in blockchain over the past 10 years (Jan 1st 2013 to Dec 31st 2022). The following are the research questions:

• Part I (Explanation): What are the main keywords and topics of tweets about data privacy/security in blockchain over the past 10 years?
• Part II (Prediction): Is data privacy/security in blockchain projected to become increasingly or decreasingly popular as a topic on Twitter in 2023?

The project contains a total number of 2 data files, 5 code files, and 6 spotlight figures. All data and code were produced independently by the author.

Data

All data files are stored within the data directory.

• Explanation_Data.txt: Contains the raw content of all queried tweets.
• PS2_Data.txt: Contains the number of queried tweets for each day from Jan 1st 2013 to Dec 31st 2022. Days without queried tweets are not shown.

Code

All code files are stored within the code directory.

• PS2_Explanation_Query.ipynb: Queries and processes the raw content of all queried tweets. Produces the data file Explanation_Data.txt.
• PS2_Explanation_Analyze.ipynb: Analyzes Explanation_Data.txt. Produces the spotlight figure spotlight6.png.
• PS2_Query_Data.ipynb: Queries tweets and records their dates. Produces the data file PS2_Data.txt.
• PS2_Process_Data.ipynb: Processes and visualizes PS2_Data.txt. Produces the spotlight figures spotlight1.png and spotlight2.png.
• PS2_Analyze_Data.ipynb: Conducts predictions based on PS2_Data.txt using a two-hidden-layer neural network with 100 nodes per layer and trained for 100000 iterations. Produces the spotlight figures spotlight4.png and spotlight5.png.

Spotlights

• spotlight1.png: The number of queried tweets by months.

• spotlight2.png: The number of queried tweets by days, and the smoothed version of this data smoothed by weekly averages.

• spotlight3.png: An intuitive display of the relationship of the queried data with the DAO hack incident and its subsequent SEC ruling.

• spotlight4.png: Prediction of future trends of the number of queried tweets by months from 2013-2025. (2021-2022 were held out for testing and 2023-2025 are predictions for the future)

• spotlight5.png: A residual plot version of spotlight4.png. Since the residual plot shows no appearantly observable pattern, the regression was successful.

• spotlight6.png: A word cloud of the keywords of the queried tweets.

Conclusions

The following conclusions are reached from this project.

• The main keywords of tweets about data privacy/security in blockchain over the past 10 years include: new technologies (e.g. artificial intelligence, cryptocurrencies, big data), major blockchain platforms (e.g. Bitcoin, Ethereum), major security threats (e.g. ransomware, data breach, malware), and related fields of applications (e.g. healthcare, biometrics, cryptography).
• The popularity of data privacy/security in blockchain as a Twitter topic is projected to recover from its previous decrease and slowly increase in the near future.
• The SEC ruling of the DAO hack incident seems to have had more impact on the popularity of the topic of data privacy/security in blockchain than the incident itself. (An unexpected discovery not corresponding to predetermined research questions)