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

The cumulative distribution function


In the previous chapter, when discussing visual representations of numerical data, we introduced histograms, which represent the way the data is distributed across a number of intervals. One of the drawbacks of histograms is that the number of bins is always chosen somewhat arbitrarily, and incorrect choices may give useless or misleading information about the distribution of the data.

We say that histograms abstract some of the characteristics of the data. That is, a histogram allows us to ignore some of the fine-grained variability in the data so that general patterns are more apparent.

Abstraction is, in general, a good thing when analyzing a dataset but we would like to have an accurate representation of all data points that is visually compelling and computationally useful. This is provided by the cumulative distribution function. This function has always been important for statistical computations, and cumulative distribution tables were in fact an...