Book Image

Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

By : Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar
Book Image

Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition

By: Hector Cuesta, Dr. Sampath Kumar

Overview of this book

Beyond buzzwords like Big Data or Data Science, there are a great opportunities to innovate in many businesses using data analysis to get data-driven products. Data analysis involves asking many questions about data in order to discover insights and generate value for a product or a service. This book explains the basic data algorithms without the theoretical jargon, and you’ll get hands-on turning data into insights using machine learning techniques. We will perform data-driven innovation processing for several types of data such as text, Images, social network graphs, documents, and time series, showing you how to implement large data processing with MongoDB and Apache Spark.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Practical Data Analysis - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Smoothing time series


When we work with some real-world data, we might often find noise that is defined as pseudo random fluctuations in values that don't belong to the observation data. In order to avoid or reduce this noise, we can use different approaches, such as increasing the amount of data by the interpolation of new values, where the series is sparse; however, in many cases, this is not an option. Another approach is smoothing the series, typically using the averages or exponential method. The average method helps us smooth the series by replacing each element in the series with either the simple, or the weighted average of the data around it. We will define the Smoothing Window to the interval of possible values, which controls the smoothness of the result. The main disadvantage of using the moving averages approach is that if we have outliers or abrupt jumps in the original time series, the result might be inaccurate and can produce jagged curves.

In this chapter, we will implement...