Book Image

Mastering Python Data Analysis

By : Magnus Vilhelm Persson
Book Image

Mastering Python Data Analysis

By: Magnus Vilhelm Persson

Overview of this book

Python, a multi-paradigm programming language, has become the language of choice for data scientists for data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Ever imagined how to become an expert at effectively approaching data analysis problems, solving them, and extracting all of the available information from your data? Well, look no further, this is the book you want! Through this comprehensive guide, you will explore data and present results and conclusions from statistical analysis in a meaningful way. You’ll be able to quickly and accurately perform the hands-on sorting, reduction, and subsequent analysis, and fully appreciate how data analysis methods can support business decision-making. You’ll start off by learning about the tools available for data analysis in Python and will then explore the statistical models that are used to identify patterns in data. Gradually, you’ll move on to review statistical inference using Python, Pandas, and SciPy. After that, we’ll focus on performing regression using computational tools and you’ll get to understand the problem of identifying clusters in data in an algorithmic way. Finally, we delve into advanced techniques to quantify cause and effect using Bayesian methods and you’ll discover how to use Python’s tools for supervised machine learning.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering Python Data Analysis
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Multivariate distributions


So far in this chapter, we considered only the case of a random experiment that has a single numeric outcome. Within this framework, we can model only a single variable. In most data analysis problems, we may be interested in relationships between variables. For example, we might want to understand the relation between the height and weight of a person or between income and educational levels. In another situation, we may be observing a variable repeatedly. As an example, we might be interested in the daily snowfall in a region during the winter months.

To handle these situations, we need models described by multivariate distributions. We have the analogous of the cdf and pdf (or pmf for discrete distributions), but now we have to use functions depending on several variables. The univariate distributions that we discussed in the previous sections are used as building blocks, but we have the extra complication of having to specify how the different variables interact...