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

Setting up a test web server


In Chapter 1, Laying the Foundation for Reproducible Data Analysis, we discussed why unit testing is a good idea. Purists will tell you that you only need unit tests. However, the general consensus is that higher-level testing can also be useful.

Obviously, this book is about data analysis and not about web development. Still, sharing your results or data via a website or web service is a common requirement. When you mine the Web or do something else related to the Web, it often becomes necessary to reproduce certain use cases, such as login forms. As you expect of a mature language, Python has many great web frameworks. I chose Flask, a simple Pythonic web framework for this recipe because it seemed easy to set up, but you should use your own judgment because I have no idea what your requirements are.

Getting ready

I tested the code with Flask 0.10.1 from Anaconda. Install Flask with conda or pip, as follows:

$ conda install flask
$ pip install flask

How to do it...