Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Ashish Kumar, Gary Dougan
Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Ashish Kumar, Gary Dougan

Overview of this book

Social Media and the Internet of Things have resulted in an avalanche of data. Data is powerful but not in its raw form - It needs to be processed and modeled, and Python is one of the most robust tools out there to do so. It has an array of packages for predictive modeling and a suite of IDEs to choose from. Learning to predict who would win, lose, buy, lie, or die with Python is an indispensable skill set to have in this data age. This book is your guide to getting started with Predictive Analytics using Python. You will see how to process data and make predictive models from it. We balance both statistical and mathematical concepts, and implement them in Python using libraries such as pandas, scikit-learn, and numpy. You’ll start by getting an understanding of the basics of predictive modeling, then you will see how to cleanse your data of impurities and get it ready it for predictive modeling. You will also learn more about the best predictive modeling algorithms such as Linear Regression, Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression. Finally, you will see the best practices in predictive modeling, as well as the different applications of predictive modeling in the modern world.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Predictive Analytics with Python
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
A List of Links
Index

Handling missing values


Checking for missing values and handling them properly is an important step in the data preparation process, if they are left untreated they can:

  • Lead to the behavior between the variables not being analyzed correctly

  • Lead to incorrect interpretation and inference from the data

To see how; move up a few pages to see how the describe method is explained. Look at the output table; why are the counts for many of the variables different from each other? There are 1310 rows in the dataset, as we saw earlier in the section. Why is it then that the count is 1046 for age, 1309 for pclass, and 121 for body. This is because the dataset doesn't have a value for 264 (1310-1046) entries in the age column, 1 (1310-1309) entry in the pclass column, and 1189 (1310-121) entries in the body column. In other words, these many entries have missing values in their respective columns. If a column has a count value less than the number of rows in the dataset, it is most certainly because the...