Book Image

Python Data Analysis Cookbook

By : Ivan Idris
Book Image

Python Data Analysis Cookbook

By: Ivan Idris

Overview of this book

Data analysis is a rapidly evolving field and Python is a multi-paradigm programming language suitable for object-oriented application development and functional design patterns. As Python offers a range of tools and libraries for all purposes, it has slowly evolved as the primary language for data science, including topics on: data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Python Data Analysis Cookbook focuses on reproducibility and creating production-ready systems. You will start with recipes that set the foundation for data analysis with libraries such as matplotlib, NumPy, and pandas. You will learn to create visualizations by choosing color maps and palettes then dive into statistical data analysis using distribution algorithms and correlations. You’ll then help you find your way around different data and numerical problems, get to grips with Spark and HDFS, and then set up migration scripts for web mining. In this book, you will dive deeper into recipes on spectral analysis, smoothing, and bootstrapping methods. Moving on, you will learn to rank stocks and check market efficiency, then work with metrics and clusters. You will achieve parallelism to improve system performance by using multiple threads and speeding up your code. By the end of the book, you will be capable of handling various data analysis techniques in Python and devising solutions for problem scenarios.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Python Data Analysis Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Glossary
Index

Introduction


Reproducible data analysis is a cornerstone of good science. In today's rapidly evolving world of science and technology, reproducibility is a hot topic. Reproducibility is about lowering barriers for other people. It may seem strange or unnecessary, but reproducible analysis is essential to get your work acknowledged by others. If a lot of people confirm your results, it will have a positive effect on your career. However, reproducible analysis is hard. It has important economic consequences, as you can read in Freedman LP, Cockburn IM, Simcoe TS (2015) The Economics of Reproducibility in Preclinical Research. PLoS Biol 13(6): e1002165. doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1002165.

So reproducibility is important for society and for you, but how does it apply to Python users? Well, we want to lower barriers for others by:

  • Giving information about the software and hardware we used, including versions.

  • Sharing virtual environments.

  • Logging program behavior.

  • Unit testing the code. This also serves as documentation of sorts.

  • Sharing configuration files.

  • Seeding random generators and making sure program behavior is as deterministic as possible.

  • Standardizing reporting, data access, and code style.

I created the dautil package for this book, which you can install with pip or from the source archive provided in this book's code bundle. If you are in a hurry, run $ python install_ch1.py to install most of the software for this chapter, including dautil. I created a test Docker image, which you can use if you don't want to install anything except Docker (see the recipe, Sandboxing Python applications with Docker images).