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

Introduction


We learned about databases in the previous chapter, so now it is time to combine the knowledge of data wrangling and Python with a real-world scenario. In the real world, data from one source is often inadequate to perform analysis. Generally, a data wrangler has to distinguish between relevant and non-relevant data and combine data from different sources.

The primary job of a data wrangling expert is to pull data from multiple sources, format and clean it (impute the data if it is missing), and finally combine it in a coherent manner to prepare a dataset for further analysis by data scientists or machine learning engineers.

In this topic, we will try to mimic such a typical task flow by downloading and using two different datasets from reputed web portals. Each of the datasets contains partial data pertaining to the key question that is being asked. Let's examine it more closely.