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


We finished covering the basics of interacting with data in different commonly used storage mechanisms from the simple ones, such as text files, over more structured ones, such as HDF5, to more sophisticated data storage systems, such as MongoDB and Redis. The most suitable type of storage will depend on your use case. The choice of the data storage layer technology plays an important role in the overall design of data processing systems. Sometimes, we need to combine various database systems to store our data, such as complexity of the data, performance of the system or computation requirements.

Practice exercise

  • Take a data set of your choice and design storage options for it. Consider text files, HDF5, a document database, and a data structure store as possible persistent options. Also evaluate how difficult (by some metric, for examples, how many lines of code) it would be to update or delete a specific item. Which storage type is the easiest to set up? Which storage type supports...