Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By : Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By: Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining. You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti • Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim • Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
Index

Tidying when multiple variables are stored as column names


One particular flavor of messy data appears whenever the column names contain multiple different variables themselves. A common example of this scenario occurs when age and sex are concatenated together. To tidy datasets like this, we must manipulate the columns with the pandas str accessor, an attribute that contains additional methods for string processing.

Getting ready...

In this recipe, we will first identify all the variables of which some will be concatenated together as column names. We then reshape the data and parse the text to extract the correct variable values.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the men's weightlifting dataset, and identify the variables:
>>> weightlifting = pd.read_csv('data/weightlifting_men.csv')
>>> weightlifting
  1. The variables are the weight category, sex/age category, and the qualifying total. The age and sex variables have been concatenated together into a single cell. Before we can separate them...