Book Image

Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook

By : Eric Rochester
Book Image

Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook

By: Eric Rochester

Overview of this book

<p>Data is everywhere and it's increasingly important to be able to gain insights that we can act on. Using Clojure for data analysis and collection, this book will show you how to gain fresh insights and perspectives from your data with an essential collection of practical, structured recipes.<br /><br />"The Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook" presents recipes for every stage of the data analysis process. Whether scraping data off a web page, performing data mining, or creating graphs for the web, this book has something for the task at hand.<br /><br />You'll learn how to acquire data, clean it up, and transform it into useful graphs which can then be analyzed and published to the Internet. Coverage includes advanced topics like processing data concurrently, applying powerful statistical techniques like Bayesian modelling, and even data mining algorithms such as K-means clustering, neural networks, and association rules.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Clojure Data Analysis Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


You probably won't spend as much time getting the data as you will getting it into shape. Raw data is often inconsistent, duplicated, or full of holes. You have to fix it before it's usable.

This is often a very iterative, interactive process: If it's a very large dataset, I may create a sample to work with at this stage. Generally, I start by examining the data files. Once I find a problem, I try to code a solution, which I run on the dataset. After each change, I archive the data, either using a ZIP file or—if the data files are small enough—using Git (http://git-scm.com/) or another version control system. Using a version control system is nice, because I can track the code to transform the data along with the data itself, and I can include comments about what I'm doing. Then I look at the data again, and the whole process starts over. Even once I've moved on to analyze the data, I may find more issues or need to change the data somehow to make it easier to analyze, and I...