Review of lemon Balm

Data Cleaning and preprocessing

Prior to analysis the review data was scraped from amazon. The data was in csv formats with columns which contains the product name which contains lemon balm, ingredient list of said product, reviews of the product and average rating of the product. The review data was cleaned with python by removal of punctuation marks and converting the letters to lower case. Since part of the agenda was data mining, stop words were removed from the review data and the data was lemmatized to convert most of the words to their basic forms. The same cleaning strategy was used on the ingredient list to find effective synergy ingredients.

Review of Lemon balm

Out of 700,000 valid reviews, lemon balm reviews had about 12,000 reviews. The names used to search for lemon were lemon balm, lemonbalm, balsamo de limon, cure-all, dropsy plant, honey plant, melisa, melissa,melissa officinalis, melissae folium, mellisse, melisse, melisse cintronelle, melisse officinale,  melissenblatt, monarde, sweet balm, sweet mary, toronjil

Most of the reviews were positive and in the positive reviews the major appraisals were directed to the fact that the drink was excellent and it alleviated stress, anxiety,depression, pain such as migraine, reduced cortisol level . It also allowed for better sleep. One reviewer did say it alleviated his/her hyperthyroidism. Another reviewer did say it made the daughter’s molluscum go away. Another reviewer said it helped in reduction of blood pressure. Generally, in the positive reviews, the nice taste and its good effect on sleep and relaxation had the highest accreditation.

The major concerns in the negative reviews were the fact that the drink tasted or smelled horribly, gave terrible cold sores and in some cases caused bloating, intense stomach pain and was making the reviewer sick. One reviewer said it caused hyperactivity of the son but with a high dosage.

Since the major complaint in the negative reviews was the smell and taste of the product, ingredient analysis was done to check which ingredient was possibly responsible for the bad taste and possible side effects such as bloating and stomach pain. To that regard, the ingredients present in positive reviews that were not in the negative reviews were checked and the ingredients present in the negative reviews that were not in the positive reviews were checked. 

In total, there were 351 ingredients in all the products containing lemon balm. 10 ingredients were present in the negative reviews that were not in the negative reviews while 31 ingredients were present in the positive reviews that were not in the negative reviews.  The ingredients in the negative reviews that were not present in the positive reviews were:

•          toronjil lemon balm melissa officinalis, 

•          evaporated cane juice

•          jerusalem artichoke 

•          lemon balm flower

•          ashwagandha root

•          organic lemon balm extract powder

•          organic prickly pear extract powder

•          organic apple extract powder

•          organic lemon balm

The mean sentiment score was collected for all ingredients to know ingredients related with poorer sentiment or negative reviews. The ingredients mostly related to very poor negative reviews were: 

•          Organic lemon balm powder

•          Organic Prickly pear extract powder

•          Toronjil lemon balm

•          Organic apple extract powder

•          Organic lemon balm

•          Meyer root extract

•          Ashwaganda root extract

•          Ginseng panax

•          Lemon balm essential oil fragrance

•          John wort herb

•          Gravel root

•          White oak bark

Synergy ingredient in effective products containing lemon balm

The total number of products containing lemon balm was equal to 73. The effectiveness of the products was determined by the sentiment score of the product. So the higher the sentiment score, the higher the effectiveness of the products. So the synergy ingredients were computed instead by dividing into sentiment scores. 

Sentiment scores of 0.8 and above were termed highly effective products, sentiment scores of 0.5 and above were moderately effective and those above 0.5 were seen as normally effective. 

Amongst the highly effective product the following synergy ingredients were mostly observed in conjunction with lemon balm:

• Lemon balm, valerian root and  stevia leaf

• Lemon balm valerian root, stevia leaf and chamomile flower

• Lemon balm and tea tree flower

• Lemon balm passion flower and chamomile flower

• Lemon balm, valerian root, stevia leaf, chamomile flower and melatonin

• Shea butter, lemon balm and tea tree

• Shea butter, lemon balm, tea tree and peppermint

• Passion flower, chamomile flower, lemon balm and orange peel .

• Passion flower, chamomile flower, lemon balm, orange peel, catnip and stevia leaf

• Chamomile flower, lemon balm, orange peel, catnip, stevia leaf, valerian root

• Lemon balm,orange peel, catnip, stevia leaf, valerian root and soy oil.

Amongst the moderately effective product the following synergy ingredients were mostly observed in conjunction with lemon balm:

• Lemon balm, valerian root and stevia leaf

• Lemon balm valerian root, stevia leaf, chamomile flower.

• Valerian root, stevia leaf, chamomile flower and melatonin

• Lemon balm and tea tree

• Lemon balm, valerian root, stevia leaf, chamomile flower and melatonin.

• Passion flower, chamomile flower, lemon balm and orange peel.

• Chamomile flower, lemon balm, orange peel, catnip and stevia leaf

• Orange peel, catnip, stevia leaf, valerian root and soy

• Passion flower, lemon balm, orange peel, catnip and stevia leaf

• Chamomile flower, lemon balm, orange peel, catnip, stevia leaf and valerian root.

• Olive oil, beeswax, licorice, walnut, lemon balm, echinacea flower and elm bark.

The same pattern was also seen across the other divisions including those with negative sentiments. 

Side effect analysis

The percentage of reviews that reported side effect is 16.28%

The major side effect reported were:

• Cold sores

• Groggy feeling

• Blisters

• Pain

• Headache

• Restlessness

• Itching

• Allergy

• Cramp

• Discomfort

Some other reviews mentioned:

• Bloating

• Diarrhea

• Psoriasis

• Nausea

With respect to combination of side effects the following were mentions in the reviews:

• Fever and blisters

• Pain with sores

Further analysis

Ingredients mostly related to side effects or negative effects and those related to the positive effects. 

Recommendation

Survey data can include specific data on side effects for better analysis of possible negative effects of the products.

Below is the link to the jupyter notebook for the review and ingredient analysis