Technologies: Amazon Web Services (RDS, S3, limited CLI), Amazon Vine, Google Colab (Python), PGAdmin, PySpark

The code solutions for this project (.ipynb files) are executed in Google Colaboratory. Colab provisions full accessibility in preparation for handing over maintenance responsibilities to the client upon the completion of this project. The Colab platform also provides access to cloud-based computational resources that guarantee the user's ablility to replicate any results regardless of data set size.

Background: Amazon Vine is a service that allows manufacturers and publishers to receive reviews for products. The manufacturer/publisher pays a fee to Amazon and provides products to Amazon Vine members in exchange for product reviews.

This project sifts through the review dataset from any subsection provided by Amazon Vine to determine if there is any bias in the number of stars awarded in paid product reviews vs. unpaid. There are 50 datasets available on Amazon Vine. Individual datasets hold reviews from each of the 50 product categories currently listed on Amazon. The code provided in the repository accesses reviews from the "Watches" subcategory of Amazon Vine. However, the exercise below was conducted using data from the "Automotive" subcategory to demonstrate the insights resulting from the evaluation. This repository can be used as a general template to replicate results for any review data subcategory in the future.

Note: The procedure outlined below begins after acquiring the target dataset from Amazon Vine's API. The raw data set is uploaded to an S3 bucket in Amazon RDS. This step is not required and exists merely to showcase fluency in using Amazon Web Services. It is also assumed that the Postgres tables are already formatted to match the data frames that will be generated in step 3.

1.) Import dependencies and drivers that allow spark to interact with Postgres.
2.) Load the target data from S3 into a spark data frame.
3.) The review data are separated using pyspark.sql into data frames matching the pre-existing table frameworks in Postgres.
      a.) The review data are filtered into a table to only include reviews with 20 or more votes.
      b.) The review data are filtered into a table to only include those that recieved a 50% or above "Helpful" vote.
      c.) The data is then separated into two groups:
            - Paid reviews
            - Unpaid reviews
       Note: it is at this time in the code that the review_date column is converted into 'yyyy-MM-dd' format wherever applicable.

4.) Connect to AWS RDS instance and write each dataframe to its table.
       This process can be time-consuming, time elapsed is included as comments in Amazon_Reviews_ETL.ipynb.

5.) Gather performance indicators.

• How many reviews exist in each category? (7793)
• How many reviews were 5 stars? (4041 - 52% of the population)
• What percentage of the 5-star reviews are paid? unpaid? (see Summary)

See fig. 1, 2

Evaluation of reviews from the automotive section results in a somewhat surprising conclusion. When assessing the results. The number of paid 5-star reviews is outnumbered by unpaid 5-star reviews by a factor of nearly 300:1. An overwhelming number of unpaid reviews are 5 stars, and comprise 51.9% of the total unpaid population. Of the 43 paid reviews, only 14 were 5 stars, comprising only 32.6% of the total paid review population. The conclusion drawn from the assessment of the automotive review section is as follows: consumers need no additional incentive to report a good experience with a product. This is proven by the overwhelming ratio of unpaid 5-star reviews to paid (incentivized) reviews. Note that this conclusion is drawn without the consideration of any omitted variables that could dictate the skew of the population towards the unpaid side.