---
title: "Product Classification API Part 1: Data Acquisition"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/product-classification-api-part-1-data-acquisition-ydcku9r59
source_url: https://eugeneyan.com/writing/product-categorization-api-part-1-data-acquisition-and-formatting
type: article
source: "Eugene Yan"
published: 2026-05-31T07:40:39.736Z
updated: 2026-05-31T08:20:53.973Z
tags: ["machine-learning", "python", "data-analysis", "pandas"]
reading_time: 8
upvotes: 0
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Product Classification API Part 1: Data Acquisition

**[Eugene Yan](https://daily.dev/sources/eugeneyan)** · 8 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A walkthrough of the data acquisition and preparation phase for building a product classification API using Amazon product metadata. Covers parsing 9.4 million products from gzipped JSON, loading into pandas DataFrames, extracting and formatting category paths, and applying multiple filtering steps (removing missing data, excluding non-title-classifiable categories like Books and Movies, keeping only deepest category paths, and dropping categories with fewer than 10 products) to arrive at a clean 4.59 million product dataset ready for model training.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://eugeneyan.com/writing/product-categorization-api-part-1-data-acquisition-and-formatting>

## Similar posts on daily.dev

- [Amazon SageMaker Catalog provides automatic data classification using AI agents](https://daily.dev/posts/amazon-sagemaker-catalog-provides-automatic-data-classification-using-ai-agents-cs058ktri) · AWS · 0 upvotes · 0 comments
- [EDA in Public \(Part 2\): Product Deep Dive & Time-Series Analysis in Pandas](https://daily.dev/posts/eda-in-public-part-2-product-deep-dive-time-series-analysis-in-pandas-ipweyrxss) · Towards Data Science · 1 upvotes · 0 comments

---

Tags: [#machine-learning](https://daily.dev/tags/machine-learning), [#python](https://daily.dev/tags/python), [#data-analysis](https://daily.dev/tags/data-analysis), [#pandas](https://daily.dev/tags/pandas)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/product-classification-api-part-1-data-acquisition-ydcku9r59)