This is repost of my article from Pellucid Tech Blog
Background
At Pellucid Analytics we we are building a platform that automates and simplifies the creation of data-driven chartbooks, so that it takes minutes instead of hours to get from raw data to powerful visualizations and compelling stories.
One of industries we are focusing on is Investment Banking. We are helping IB advisory professionals build pitch-books, and provide them with analytical and quantitative support to sell their ideas. Comparable Companies Analysis is central to this business.
Comparable company analysis starts with establishing a peer group consisting of similar companies of similar size in the same industry and region.
The problem we are faced with is finding a scalable solution to establish a peer group for any chosen company.
Approaches That We Tried
Company Industry
Data vendors provide industry classification for each company, and it helps a lot in industries like retail (Wal-Mart is good comparable to Costco), energy (Chevron and Exxon Mobil) but it stumbles with many other companies. People tend to compare Amazon with Google as a two major players in it business, but data vendors tend to put Amazon in retail industry with Wal-Mart/Costco as comparables.
Company Financials and Valuation Multiples
We tried cluster analysis and k-nearest neighbors to group companies based on their financials (Sales, Revenue) and valuation multiples (EV/EBIDTA, P/E). However assumptions that similar companies will have similar valuations multiples is wrong. People compare Twitter with Facebook as two biggest companies in social media, but based on their financials they don’t have too much in common. Facebook 2013 revenue is almost $8 billion and Twitter has only $600 million.
Novel Approach
We came up with an idea that if companies are often mentioned in news articles and tweets together, it’s probably a sign that people think about them as comparable companies. In this post I’ll show how we built proof of concept for this idea with Spark, Spark Streaming and Cassandra. We use only Twitter live stream data for now, accessing high quality news data is a bit more complicated problem.
Let’s take for example this tweet from CNN:
Trying to spot the next or ? These 10 startups are worth keeping an eye on ..
— CNN Public Relations
From this tweet we can derive 2 mentions for 2 companies. For Facebook it will be Twitter and vice-versa. If we collect tweets for all companies over some period of time, and take a ratio of joint appearance in same tweet as a measure of “similarity”, we can build comparable company recommendations based on this measure.
Data Model
We use Cassandra to store all mentions, aggregates and final recommendations. We use Phantom DSL for scala to define schema and for most of Cassandra operations (spark integration is not yet supported in Phantom).
/** * Mention of focus company * * @param ticker ticker of focus company * @param source source of this mention (Twitter, RSS, etc...) * @param sourceId source specific id * @param time time * @param mentions set of other tickers including focus ticker itself */ case class Mention(ticker: Ticker, source: String, sourceId: String, time: DateTime, mentions: Set[Ticker]) sealed class MentionRecord extends CassandraTable[MentionRecord, Mention] with Serializable { override val tableName: String = "mention" object ticker extends StringColumn (this) with PartitionKey[String] object source extends StringColumn (this) with PrimaryKey[String] object time extends DateTimeColumn (this) with PrimaryKey[DateTime] object source_id extends StringColumn (this) with PrimaryKey[String] object mentions extends SetColumn[MentionRecord, Mention, String] (this) def fromRow(r: Row): Mention = { Mention(Ticker(ticker(r)), source(r), source_id(r), time(r), mentions(r) map Ticker) } }
/** * Count mentions for each ticker pair * * @param ticker ticker of focus company * @param mentionedWith mentioned with this ticker * @param count number of mentions */ case class MentionsAggregate(ticker: Ticker, mentionedWith: Ticker, count: Long) sealed class MentionsAggregateRecord extends CassandraTable[MentionsAggregateRecord, MentionsAggregate] { override val tableName: String = "mentions_aggregate" object ticker extends StringColumn (this) with PartitionKey[String] object mentioned_with extends StringColumn (this) with PrimaryKey[String] object counter extends LongColumn (this) def fromRow(r: Row): MentionsAggregate = { MentionsAggregate(Ticker(ticker(r)), Ticker(mentioned_with(r)), counter(r)) } }
/** * Recommendation built based on company mentions with other companies * * @param ticker focus company ticker * @position recommendation position * @param recommendation recommended company ticker * @param p number of times recommended company mentioned together * with focus company divided by total focus company mentions */ case class Recommendation(ticker: Ticker, position: Long, recommendation: Ticker, p: Double) sealed class RecommendationRecord extends CassandraTable[RecommendationRecord, Recommendation] { override val tableName: String = "recommendation" object ticker extends StringColumn (this) with PartitionKey[String] object position extends LongColumn (this) with PrimaryKey[Long] object recommendation extends StringColumn (this) object p extends DoubleColumn (this) def fromRow(r: Row): Recommendation = { Recommendation(Ticker(ticker(r)), position(r), Ticker(recommendation(r)), p(r)) } }
Ingest Real-Time Twitter Stream
We use Spark Streaming Twitter integration to subscribe for real-time twitter updates, then we extract company mentions and put them to Cassandra. Unfortunately Phantom doesn’t support Spark yet, so we used Datastax Spark Cassandra Connector with custom type mappers to map from Phantom-record types into Cassandra tables.
class MentionStreamFunctions(@transient stream: DStream[Mention]) extends Serializable { import TickerTypeConverter._ TypeConverter.registerConverter(StringToTickerTypeConverter) TypeConverter.registerConverter(TickerToStringTypeConverter) implicit object MentionMapper extends DefaultColumnMapper[Mention](Map( "ticker" -> "ticker", "source" -> "source", "sourceId" -> "source_id", "time" -> "time", "mentions" -> "mentions" )) def saveMentionsToCassandra(keyspace: String) = { stream.saveToCassandra(keyspace, MentionRecord.tableName) } }
private val filters = Companies.load().map(c => s"$$${c.ticker.value}") val sc = new SparkContext(sparkConf) val ssc = new StreamingContext(sc, Seconds(2)) val stream = TwitterUtils.createStream(ssc, None, filters = filters) // Save Twitter Stream to cassandra stream.foreachRDD(updates => log.info(s"Received Twitter stream updates. Count: ${updates.count()}")) stream.extractMentions.saveMentionsToCassandra(keySpace) // Start Streaming Application ssc.start()
Spark For Aggregation and Recommendation
To come up with comparable company recommendation we use 2-step process.
1. Count mentions for each pair of tickers
After Mentions
table loaded in Spark as RDD[Mention]
we extract pairs of tickers, and it enables bunch of aggregate and reduce functions from Spark PairRDDFunctions
. With aggregateByKey
and given combine functions we efficiently build counter map Map[Ticker, Long]
for each ticker distributed in cluster. From single Map[Ticker, Long]
we emit multiple aggregates for each ticket pair.
class AggregateMentions(@transient sc: SparkContext, keyspace: String) extends CassandraMappers with Serializable { private type Counter = Map[Ticker, Long] private implicit lazy val summ = Semigroup.instance[Long](_ + _) private lazy val seqOp: (Counter, Ticker) => Counter = { case (counter, ticker) if counter.isDefinedAt(ticker) => counter.updated(ticker, counter(ticker) + 1) case (counter, ticker) => counter + (ticker -> 1) } private lazy val combOp: (Counter, Counter) => Counter = { case (l, r) => implicitly[Monoid[Counter]].append(l, r) } def aggregate(): Unit = { // Emit pairs of (Focus Company Ticker, Mentioned With) val pairs = sc.cassandraTable[Mention](keyspace, MentionRecord.tableName). flatMap(mention => mention.mentions.map((mention.ticker, _))) // Calculate mentions for each ticker val aggregated = pairs.aggregateByKey(Map.empty[Ticker, Long])(seqOp, combOp) // Build MentionsAggregate from counters val mentionsAggregate = aggregated flatMap { case (ticker, counter) => counter map { case (mentionedWith, count) => MentionsAggregate(ticker, mentionedWith, count) } } mentionsAggregate.saveToCassandra(keyspace, MentionsAggregateRecord.tableName) } }
2. Sort aggregates and build recommendations
After aggregates computed, we sort them globally and then group them by key (Ticker). After all aggregates grouped we produce Recommendation
in single traverse distributed for each key.
class Recommend(@transient sc: SparkContext, keyspace: String) extends CassandraMappers with Serializable { private def toRecommendation: (MentionsAggregate, Int) => Recommendation = { var totalMentions: Option[Long] = None { case (aggregate, idx) if totalMentions.isEmpty => totalMentions = Some(aggregate.count) Recommendation(aggregate.ticker, idx, aggregate.mentionedWith, 1) case (aggregate, idx) => Recommendation(aggregate.ticker, idx, aggregate.mentionedWith, aggregate.count.toDouble / totalMentions.get) } } def recommend(): Unit = { val aggregates = sc. cassandraTable[MentionsAggregate](keyspace, MentionsAggregateRecord.tableName). sortBy(_.count, ascending = false) val recommendations = aggregates. groupBy(_.ticker). mapValues(_.zipWithIndex). flatMapValues(_ map toRecommendation.tupled).values recommendations.saveToCassandra(keyspace, RecommendationRecord.tableName) } }
Results
You can check comparable company recommendations build from Twitter stream using this link.
Cassandra and Spark works perfectly together and allows you to build scalable data-driven applications, that are super easy to scale out and handle gigabytes and terabytes of data. In this particular case, it’s probably an overkill. Twitter doesn’t have enough finance-related activity to produce serious load. However it’s easy to extend this application and add other streams: Bloomberg News Feed, Thompson Reuters, etc.
The code for this application app can be found on Github