Book Image

Data Wrangling with Python

By : Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury
Book Image

Data Wrangling with Python

By: Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury

Overview of this book

For data to be useful and meaningful, it must be curated and refined. Data Wrangling with Python teaches you the core ideas behind these processes and equips you with knowledge of the most popular tools and techniques in the domain. The book starts with the absolute basics of Python, focusing mainly on data structures. It then delves into the fundamental tools of data wrangling like NumPy and Pandas libraries. You'll explore useful insights into why you should stay away from traditional ways of data cleaning, as done in other languages, and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. This combination of Python tips and tricks will also demonstrate how to use the same Python backend and extract/transform data from an array of sources including the Internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, you'll cover how to handle missing or wrong data, and reformat it based on the requirements from the downstream analytics tool. The book will further help you grasp concepts through real-world examples and datasets. By the end of this book, you will be confident in using a diverse array of sources to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Data Wrangling with Python
Preface
Appendix

Useful Methods of Pandas


In this topic, we will discuss some small utility functions that are offered by pandas so that we can work efficiently with DataFrames. They don't fall under any particular group of function, so they are mentioned here under the Miscellaneous category.

Exercise 57: Randomized Sampling

Sampling a random fraction of a big DataFrame is often very useful so that we can practice other methods on them and test our ideas. If you have a database table of 1 million records, then it is not computationally effective to run your test scripts on the full table.

However, you may also not want to extract only the first 100 elements as the data may have been sorted by a particular key and you may get an uninteresting table back, which may not represent the full statistical diversity of the parent database.

In these situations, the sample method comes in super handy so that we can randomly choose a controlled fraction of the DataFrame:

  1. Specify the number of samples that you require from...