Book Image

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Book Image

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Overview of this book

Data analysis is the process of applying logical and analytical reasoning to study each component of data. Python is a multi-domain, high-level, programming language. It’s often used as a scripting language because of its forgiving syntax and operability with a wide variety of different eco-systems. Python has powerful standard libraries or toolkits such as Pylearn2 and Hebel, which offers a fast, reliable, cross-platform environment for data analysis. With this book, we will get you started with Python data analysis and show you what its advantages are. The book starts by introducing the principles of data analysis and supported libraries, along with NumPy basics for statistic and data processing. Next it provides an overview of the Pandas package and uses its powerful features to solve data processing problems. Moving on, the book takes you through a brief overview of the Matplotlib API and some common plotting functions for DataFrame such as plot. Next, it will teach you to manipulate the time and data structure, and load and store data in a file or database using Python packages. The book will also teach you how to apply powerful packages in Python to process raw data into pure and helpful data using examples. Finally, the book gives you a brief overview of machine learning algorithms, that is, applying data analysis results to make decisions or build helpful products, such as recommendations and predictions using scikit-learn.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with Python Data Analysis
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Summary


In this chapter, we presented three main points. Firstly, we figured out the relationship between raw data, information and knowledge. Due to its contribution to our lives, we continued to discuss an overview of data analysis and processing steps in the second section. Finally, we introduced a few common supported libraries that are useful for practical data analysis applications. Among those, in the next chapters, we will focus on Python libraries in data analysis.

Practice exercise

The following table describes users' rankings on Snow White movies:

UserID

Sex

Location

Ranking

A

Male

Philips

4

B

Male

VN

2

C

Male

Canada

1

D

Male

Canada

2

E

Female

VN

5

F

Female

NY

4

Exercise 1: What information can we find in this table? What kind of knowledge can we derive from it?

Exercise 2: Based on the data analysis process in this chapter, try to define the data requirements and analysis steps needed to predict whether user B likes Maleficent movies or not.