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

Logistical overview


In this chapter, I will demonstrate four projects, using four programs respectively. These are as follows:

  • csv_intro.pyAn introduction to Python's built-in csv module
  • pandas_intro.py: An introduction to the pandas module
  • json_to_csv.py: An exercise in working with CSV data
  • xml_to_json.py: An introduction to the xml.etree.ElementTree module and an exercise in working with XML data

The finished product for each of these projects can be obtained from the code folder in the external resources. All of the external resources are available in one folder at the following link: https://goo.gl/8S58ra.

File system setup

To follow along with the exercises, you should create a project folder called ch4 to contain all of the code and data. There are a number of different programs, input datasets, and output datasets involved in the projects and exercises in this chapter. To keep things organized, I've created an additional folder to contain the code for the chapter. I've also fragmented...