Book Image

Hands-On Data Analysis with NumPy and Pandas

By : Curtis Miller
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Data Analysis with NumPy and Pandas

5 (1)
By: Curtis Miller

Overview of this book

Python, a multi-paradigm programming language, has become the language of choice for data scientists for visualization, data analysis, and machine learning. Hands-On Data Analysis with NumPy and Pandas starts by guiding you in setting up the right environment for data analysis with Python, along with helping you install the correct Python distribution. In addition to this, you will work with the Jupyter notebook and set up a database. Once you have covered Jupyter, you will dig deep into Python’s NumPy package, a powerful extension with advanced mathematical functions. You will then move on to creating NumPy arrays and employing different array methods and functions. You will explore Python’s pandas extension which will help you get to grips with data mining and learn to subset your data. Last but not the least you will grasp how to manage your datasets by sorting and ranking them. By the end of this book, you will have learned to index and group your data for sophisticated data analysis and manipulation.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Package management with Conda


We will now discuss package management with Conda. In this section, we're going to take a look at the following topics:

  • What is Conda?
  • Managing Conda environments
  • Managing Python with Conda
  • Managing packages with Conda

What is Conda?

So what is Conda? Conda is the Anaconda package manager. Conda allows us to create and manage multiple environments, allowing multiple versions of Python, R, and their relevant packages to exist. This can be very useful if you need to develop for different systems with different versions of Python and their packages. Conda allows you to manage Python and R versions, and it also facilitates installation and management of packages.

Conda environment management

A Conda environment allows developers to use and manage different versions of Python in its packages. This can be useful for testing and development on legacy systems. Environments can be saved, cloned, and exported so that others can replicate results.

Here are some common environment management commands.

For environment creation:

conda create --name env_name prog1 prog2conda create --name env_name python=3 prog3

For listing environments:

conda env list

To verify the environment:

conda info --envs

To clone the environment:

conda create --name new_env --clone old_env

To remove environments:

conda remove --name env_name -all

Users can share environments by creating a YAML file, which recipients can use to construct an identical environment. You can do this by hand, where you effectively replicate what Anaconda would make, but it is much easier to have Anaconda create a YAML file for you.

After you have created such a file, or if you've received this file from another user, it is very easy to create a new environment.

Managing Python

As mentioned earlier, Anaconda allows you to manage multiple versions of Python. It is possible to search and see which versions of Python are available for installation. You can verify which version of Python is in an environment, and you can even create environments for Python 2.7. You can also update the version of Python that is in a current environment.

Package management

Let's suppose that we're interested in installing the package selenium, which is a package that is used for web scraping and also web testing. We can list the packages that are currently installed, and we can give the command to install a new package.

First, we should search to see whether the package is available from the Conda system. Not all packages that are available on pip are available from Conda. That said, it is in fact possible to install a package available from pip, although hopefully, if we wish to install a package, we can use the following command:

conda install selenium

If selenium is the package we're interested in, it can be downloaded automatically from the internet, unless you have a file that Anaconda can install directly from your system.

To install packages via pip, use the following:

pip install package_name

Packages, of course, can be removed as follows:

conda remove selenium