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

An overview of the Pandas package


Pandas is a Python package that supports fast, flexible, and expressive data structures, as well as computing functions for data analysis. The following are some prominent features that Pandas supports:

  • Data structure with labeled axes. This makes the program clean and clear and avoids common errors from misaligned data.

  • Flexible handling of missing data.

  • Intelligent label-based slicing, fancy indexing, and subset creation of large datasets.

  • Powerful arithmetic operations and statistical computations on a custom axis via axis label.

  • Robust input and output support for loading or saving data from and to files, databases, or HDF5 format.

Related to Pandas installation, we recommend an easy way, that is to install it as a part of Anaconda, a cross-platform distribution for data analysis and scientific computing. You can refer to the reference at http://docs.continuum.io/anaconda/ to download and install the library.

After installation, we can use it like other Python...