Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By : Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By: Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining. You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti • Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim • Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
Index

Grouping by continuous variables


When grouping in pandas, you typically use columns with discrete repeating values. If there are no repeated values, then grouping would be pointless as there would only be one row per group. Continuous numeric columns typically have few repeated values and are generally not used to form groups. However, if we can transform columns with continuous values into a discrete column by placing each value into a bin, rounding them, or using some other mapping, then grouping with them makes sense.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we explore the flights dataset to discover the distribution of airlines for different travel distances. This allows us, for example, to find the airline that makes the most flights between 500 and 1,000 miles. To accomplish this, we use the pandas cut function to discretize the distance of each flight flown.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the flights dataset, and output the first five rows:
>>> flights = pd.read_csv('data/flights.csv')
>&gt...