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

Chapter 5. Clustering

With data comprising of several separated distributions, how do we find and characterize them? In this chapter, we will look at some ways to identify clusters in data. Groups of points with similar characteristics form clusters. There are many different algorithms and methods to achieve this with good and bad points. We want to detect multiple separate distributions in the data and determine the degree of association (or similarity) with another point or cluster for each point. The degree of association needs to be high if they belong in a cluster together or low if they do not. This can of course, just as previously, be a one-dimensional problem or multi-dimensional problem. One of the inherent difficulties of cluster finding is determining how many clusters there are in the data. Various approaches to define this exist; some where the user needs to input the number of clusters and then the algorithm finds which points belong to which cluster, and some where the starting...