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

Introduction


Time series analysis is important in several types of situations; it can be used, for example, to describe changes of a variable in time, predict or forecast through modeling the known variations, and then extrapolate these forward in time or assess how certain external stimuli affects a certain time series variable.

There are three main types of modeling and forecasting methods:

  • Extrapolation, which is the time series analysis we are focusing on in this chapter. This method simply uses historical data from which a model is built and then used to forecast/predict (that is, extrapolate) into the future.

  • Judgemental, which is used in, for example, decision making and is common where judgment or beliefs (that is, probabilities) need to be incorporated. This can be the case when no historical time series data exists.

  • Econometric, which is a regression-based method and usually tries to quantify how and to what extent certain variables/events affect the outcome of the time series....