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

Working with distributions


The main reason that we emphasize the cumulative distribution function is because, once we have access to it, we can compute any probabilities associated with the model. This is because the cdf is a universal way to specify a random variable. In particular, there is no distinction between the descriptions for continuous or discrete data. The density function of a random variable is also an important concept so we will present it in the next section. In this section, we will see how to use the cdf to do computations related to a random variable.

The functions that we will use with distributions are part of SciPy and contained in the scipy.stats module, which we import with the following code:

import scipy.stats as st 

After this, we can refer to functions in the package with the abbreviation st.

This module contains a large number of predefined distributions, and we encourage you to visit the official documentation at http://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference...