Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By : Allan Visochek
Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By: Allan Visochek

Overview of this book

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them. You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases. The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Summary


This chapter was a basic overview of the steps involved in programmatically processing data files. To recap, I first introduced file I/O and demonstrated how the Python programming language interacts with the computer's filesystem. Then, I showed how a Python file object is used with the json module to read and parse a JSON files. Following this, I walked through a basic demonstration to show how you might go about exploring the contents of a data file. Once all of this was covered, I showed how to conduct some basic data modification steps. Finally, I showed how to write data to an output file.

A particular emphasis in this chapter was placed on the process of opening, parsing data and writing the result to the output. Using some frameworks like R and Pandas opening reading and writing files is more straight forward. Future chapters will focus more on the exploration and modification steps and much less on the specifics of inputting and outputting data. Understanding how to interact...