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

Time series primer


In general, time series serve two purposes. First, they help us to learn about the underlying process that generated the data. On the other hand, we would like to be able to forecast future values of the same or related series using existing data. When we measure temperature, precipitation or wind, we would like to learn more about more complex things, such as weather or the climate of a region and how various factors interact. At the same time, we might be interested in weather forecasting.

In this chapter we will explore the time series capabilities of Pandas. Apart from its powerful core data structures – the series and the DataFrame – Pandas comes with helper functions for dealing with time related data. With its extensive built-in optimizations, Pandas is capable of handling large time series with millions of data points with ease.

We will gradually approach time series, starting with the basic building blocks of date and time objects.