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

Renaming axis levels for easy reshaping


Reshaping with the stack/unstack methods is far easier when each axis (index/column) level has a name. Pandas allows users to reference each axis level by integer location or by name. Since integer location is implicit and not explicit, you should consider using level names whenever possible. This advice follows from TheZen of Python (http://bit.ly/2xE83uC), a short list of guiding principles for Python of which the second one is Explicit is better than implicit.

Getting ready

When grouping or aggregating with multiple columns, the resulting pandas object will have multiple levels in one or both of the axes. In this recipe, we will name each level of each axis and then use the methods stack/unstack to dramatically reshape the data to the desired form.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the college dataset, and find a few basic summary statistics on the undergraduate population and SAT math scores by institution and religious affiliation:
>>> college = pd...