Find the best gift ideas for this Father’s Day in 6 quick & easy steps!

Are you looking for the best gift suggestions for this Father’s Day? Trying to choose the best gift can be difficult and can even result in analysis paralysis. What adds more to the difficulty is the desire to consider all the options to not miss out on the next best gift. As human beings, our capability to analyze the endless available options is limited, especially in a short period. In this sense, using text analytics is a lot better than scrolling endlessly for that perfect gift that your father deserves. With the help of Dcipher Analytics, you can use the power of analytics to help guide your search. In this blog, we will walk you through the exact steps on how you can conduct this analysis yourself and also provide you with some great gift suggestions from the analysis that we will do together. So let's get started?

By using analytics tools based on Artificial Intelligence, we have two main advantages to help us guide our search. The first advantage would be in the data collection stage. With Dcipher Analytics, you get access to one of the largest social media databases. This can be done without consuming much of your valuable time. The second advantage would be in the data cleaning and analysis stage. You don’t need to know how to code or understand any complex machine learning algorithms. Let us worry about that while you keep your focus on choosing the best gift for your father.

In this blog, we will use Dcipher Analytics to extract data from various social media platforms and blogs, to find the best Father’s Day gift ideas. For this analysis, blogs are a helpful resource since they have a large number of suggestions regarding this topic. All in all, we will be analyzing around 20,000 blogs and posts to find the best options out there.

1. Creating a project and importing the data

* In this video, we've cropped out the three minutes it took to import the 20,000 posts.

To begin the process, first, we will start on the Dcipher Analytics platform as you can also see in the video above. After naming the project, we will import data from social media channels and choose the platforms that we want to use. Then, we will focus on the most important part of this process. Here, it’s essential to decide which words should be written in the “All these words/phrases” field or the “Any of these words/phrases” field to find the most relevant posts from our selected sources. Once that is done, we make the necessary selections and download the data.

The next step will be to show you the operations that you can use to structure and clean the data.

2. Prepping the imported data


Social media data can be noisy, so in order to get more accurate results, it is good to clean it up before moving on to the analysis. In Dcipher Analytics' pre-processing wizard, we can remove outliers, as you can also see in the video above, by setting the word count limit between 6 to 300. This would eliminate the texts that are too long and would slow down the subsequent operations. Moreover, we also remove the duplicates, filter by language, and clean the text by eliminating URLs, XML tags, and @ tags. Lastly, we’ll split the data into paragraphs that can clean up our data and make it ready for the next few steps before we can see all the amazing gift suggestions to make this Father’s Day special, both for you and your father.

To learn more about the pre-processing step, you can check our guide regarding Text Cleaning & Pre-Processing at the help center.

3. Splitting the responses into words and phrases


Moving on to the next step, the operation we use here is called Tokenize & Tag. Tokenization is a technique for splitting text into smaller parts called Tokens in Natural Language Processing (NLP). Cleaning of punctuations, emojis, stop words, and short tokens, as well as lowercasing and lemmatization, are all available through Dcipher's Tokenize & Tag operation. We also provide other operation options such as detecting word phrases, parts-of-speech, and named entities.

And so, to apply the operations, we go to the Schema and select the field where we want to apply the operation. We then search the name of the operation on the Operations menu. These steps are demonstrated in the video above.

4. Filtering the tags


Based on the context of your analysis, filtering can come in handy for better results. And so, since we are looking for gift ideas, we are not interested in adjectives, verbs, or similar tags. For example, we are interested in a product such as a “bag” or “shoes”, but not their color “red” as an adjective. Therefore, we can choose only the relevant tags in this step for our analysis. Also, it is very important to make this filtering before the topic detection step for us to get more relevant results. This can ultimately help our decision-making even further while choosing the best possible gift(s) for your father.

5. Detecting topics


Once the filtering is done, we’ll move on to topic detection. However, before moving on to topic detection, we can check tokens and tags in the Table View. Since we already filtered in the previous step, we only see the tags and tokens we kept in the filtering step.

After checking the tokens and tags we apply the “Detect Topics” operation. Here, the aim is to interpret the words that are the most characteristic representation of each topic. Therefore, this operation gives the set of gift suggestions that we wanted to see right from the start. In the next step, we will see these suggestions by using a data visualization workbench called foam chart.

6. Visualizing on the chart


As I mentioned in the previous step, here we will use workbenches, which include various chart types, to visualize the findings. For this analysis, we can add a Foam Chart to visualize the selected topics. We can then drag and drop the labeled topics from the Schema into the Foam Chart, as shown in the video above. In Foam Charts, each group shows a topic label, and the size of the topic label reflects the number of associated posts. According to this, you can check the final result in the Foam Chart below:

As you saw with this comprehensive walk-through, with the help of Dcipher Analytics, we completed our analysis, in 6 quick and easy steps. Isn’t this better than endlessly scrolling down or pondering over the best gift to give without making a conclusive decision for days? As you can see from the chart above, the most frequent and relevant gift ideas are:

Without a doubt, you can’t go wrong with any of these choices. Let us know if you chose any of these for your father on this Father’s Day. And to not miss out on our future suggestions, make sure to follow us on our LinkedIn page as well.

Additionally, If you’d like to learn more about all the other types of charts, you can also check out our previous blog post: Four ways of visualizing free-form survey responses.

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