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

Reading Data from Different Text-Based (and Non-Text-Based) Sources


One of the most valued and widely used skills of a data wrangling professional is the ability to extract and read data from a diverse array of sources into a structured format. Modern analytics pipelines depend on their ability to scan and absorb a variety of data sources to build and analyze a pattern-rich model. Such a feature-rich, multi-dimensional model will have high predictive and generalization accuracy. It will be valued by stakeholders and end users alike for any data-driven product.

In the first topic of this chapter, we will go through various data sources and how they can be imported into pandas DataFrames, thus imbuing wrangling professionals with extremely valuable data ingestion knowledge.

Data Files Provided with This Chapter

Because this topic is about reading from various data sources, we will use small files of various types in the following exercises. All of the data files are provided along with the Jupyter...