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

Introduction to cluster finding


There are many different algorithms for cluster identification. Many of them try to solve a specific problem in the best way. Therefore, the specific algorithm that you want to use might depend on the problem you are trying to solve and also on what algorithms are available in the specific package that you are using.

Some of the first clustering algorithms consisted of simply finding the centroid positions that minimize the distances to all the points in each cluster. The points in each cluster are closer to that centroid than other cluster centroids. As might be obvious at this point, the hardest part with this is figuring out how many clusters there are. If we can determine that, it is fairly straightforward to try various ways of moving the cluster centroid around, calculate the distance to each point, and then figure out where the cluster centroids are. There are also obvious situations where this might not be the best solution, for example, if you have...