Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition

By : Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti
Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition

By: Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti

Overview of this book

Fully expanded and upgraded, the second edition of Python Data Science Essentials takes you through all you need to know to suceed in data science using Python. Get modern insight into the core of Python data, including the latest versions of Jupyter notebooks, NumPy, pandas and scikit-learn. Look beyond the fundamentals with beautiful data visualizations with Seaborn and ggplot, web development with Bottle, and even the new frontiers of deep learning with Theano and TensorFlow. Dive into building your essential Python 3.5 data science toolbox, using a single-source approach that will allow to to work with Python 2.7 as well. Get to grips fast with data munging and preprocessing, and all the techniques you need to load, analyse, and process your data. Finally, get a complete overview of principal machine learning algorithms, graph analysis techniques, and all the visualization and deployment instruments that make it easier to present your results to an audience of both data science experts and business users.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 2. Data Munging

We are just getting into action with data! In this chapter, you'll learn how to munge data. What does munging data imply?

The term munge is a technical term coined about half a century ago by the students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Munging means to change, in a series of well-specified and reversible steps, a piece of original data to a completely different (and hopefully more useful) one. Deep-rooted in hacker culture, munging is often described in the data science pipeline using other, almost synonymous, terms such as data wrangling or data preparation. It is a very important part of the data engineering pipeline.

Starting from this chapter, we will start mentioning more jargon and technicalities taken from the fields of probability and statistics (such as probability distributions, descriptive statistics, and hypothesis testing). Unfortunately, we cannot explain all of them in detail since our main purpose is to provide you with the essential...