Book Image

Python Business Intelligence Cookbook

Book Image

Python Business Intelligence Cookbook

Overview of this book

The amount of data produced by businesses and devices is going nowhere but up. In this scenario, the major advantage of Python is that it's a general-purpose language and gives you a lot of flexibility in data structures. Python is an excellent tool for more specialized analysis tasks, and is powered with related libraries to process data streams, to visualize datasets, and to carry out scientific calculations. Using Python for business intelligence (BI) can help you solve tricky problems in one go. Rather than spending day after day scouring Internet forums for “how-to” information, here you’ll find more than 60 recipes that take you through the entire process of creating actionable intelligence from your raw data, no matter what shape or form it’s in. Within the first 30 minutes of opening this book, you’ll learn how to use the latest in Python and NoSQL databases to glean insights from data just waiting to be exploited. We’ll begin with a quick-fire introduction to Python for BI and show you what problems Python solves. From there, we move on to working with a predefined data set to extract data as per business requirements, using the Pandas library and MongoDB as our storage engine. Next, we will analyze data and perform transformations for BI with Python. Through this, you will gather insightful data that will help you make informed decisions for your business. The final part of the book will show you the most important task of BI—visualizing data by building stunning dashboards using Matplotlib, PyTables, and iPython Notebook.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Python Business Intelligence Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Filling in missing values in Pandas


While we would love to obtain datasets that contain no missing values whatsoever, the reality is that we almost always have to handle them. This recipe shows you four methods that you can use.

Getting ready

Pandas provides a fillna() method to fill in missing values. Create a DataFrame from the customer data using the previous recipe, and then try each of the following methods.

How to do it…

The following code tells us how to fill in missing values in Pandas:

# 1: Replace all missing values with a string - 'Missing'
customers.fillna('Missing', inplace=True)
# 2: Replace all missing values with a 0
customers.fillna(0, inplace=True)
# 3: Replace all missing values with the mean of the DataFrame
customers.fillna(raw_data.mean(), inplace=True)
# 4. Replace the missing values of a single colum with the mean of that column
customers['marketing_score'].fillna(raw_data.mean()['marketing_score'], inplace=True)

How it works…

Each of the preceding methods uses the fillna...