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

The Bayesian method


From the Bayesian approach, data is seen as fixed. Once we have measured things, the values are fixed. On the other hand, parameters can be described by probability distributions. The probability distribution describes how much is known about a certain parameter. This description might change if we get new data, but the model itself will not change. There is lots of literature on this, and there is no rule of thumb for when to use frequentist or when to use Bayesian analysis.

For simple and fairly well-behaved data, I would say that the frequentist approach is fine when you need a quick estimate. To get more insights and for more constrained problems, that is, when we know more about our parameters and can estimate the prior distributions with more than a simple uniform prior, it is better to use the Bayesian approach. Due to the slightly more intuitive handling of things in Bayesian analysis, it is easier to build more complex models and answer complex questions.

Credible...