Book Image

Applied Data Science with Python and Jupyter

By : Alex Galea
Book Image

Applied Data Science with Python and Jupyter

By: Alex Galea

Overview of this book

Getting started with data science doesn't have to be an uphill battle. Applied Data Science with Python and Jupyter is a step-by-step guide ideal for beginners who know a little Python and are looking for a quick, fast-paced introduction to these concepts. In this book, you'll learn every aspect of the standard data workflow process, including collecting, cleaning, investigating, visualizing, and modeling data. You'll start with the basics of Jupyter, which will be the backbone of the book. After familiarizing ourselves with its standard features, you'll look at an example of it in practice with our first analysis. In the next lesson, you dive right into predictive analytics, where multiple classification algorithms are implemented. Finally, the book ends by looking at data collection techniques. You'll see how web data can be acquired with scraping techniques and via APIs, and then briefly explore interactive visualizations.
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Scraping Web Page Data


In the spirit of leveraging the internet as a database, we can think about acquiring data from web pages either by scraping content or by interfacing with web APIs. Generally, scraping content means getting the computer to read data that was intended to be displayed in a human-readable format. This is in contradistinction to web APIs, where data is delivered in machine-readable formats—the most common being JSON.

In this topic, we will focus on web scraping. The exact process for doing this will depend on the page and desired content. However, as we will see, it's quite easy to scrape anything we need from an HTML page so long as we have an understanding of the underlying concepts and tools. In this topic, we'll use Wikipedia as an example and scrape tabular content from an article. Then, we'll apply the same techniques to scrape

data from a page on an entirely separate domain. But first, we'll take some time to introduce HTTP requests.

Introduction to HTTP Requests

The...