Book Image

Mastering Python Data Analysis

By : Magnus Vilhelm Persson
Book Image

Mastering Python Data Analysis

By: Magnus Vilhelm Persson

Overview of this book

Python, a multi-paradigm programming language, has become the language of choice for data scientists for data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Ever imagined how to become an expert at effectively approaching data analysis problems, solving them, and extracting all of the available information from your data? Well, look no further, this is the book you want! Through this comprehensive guide, you will explore data and present results and conclusions from statistical analysis in a meaningful way. You’ll be able to quickly and accurately perform the hands-on sorting, reduction, and subsequent analysis, and fully appreciate how data analysis methods can support business decision-making. You’ll start off by learning about the tools available for data analysis in Python and will then explore the statistical models that are used to identify patterns in data. Gradually, you’ll move on to review statistical inference using Python, Pandas, and SciPy. After that, we’ll focus on performing regression using computational tools and you’ll get to understand the problem of identifying clusters in data in an algorithmic way. Finally, we delve into advanced techniques to quantify cause and effect using Bayesian methods and you’ll discover how to use Python’s tools for supervised machine learning.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering Python Data Analysis
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Models and experiments


Models can take many forms: a verbal description, set of mathematical equations, or segment of computer code. In this book, we are interested in a specific kind of model, probabilistic or statistical model, which represents the variability that occurs in a nondeterministic experiment.

Note

We use the term experiment in this book in a somewhat non-technical sense. For us, an experiment is any observation of an event of interest. Examples of experiments are observing the number of visitors to a website or conducting an opinion poll or clinical trial. The main characteristic of experiments, for us, is that they can be repeated and that there is randomness, that is, each repetition of the same experiment may result in different outcomes.

The models that we will consider take the form of random variables. A random variable is an idealized representation of a probabilistic outcome that has numerical results. It is important to realize that a random variable is an abstraction...