Book Image

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Book Image

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Overview of this book

Data analysis is the process of applying logical and analytical reasoning to study each component of data. Python is a multi-domain, high-level, programming language. It’s often used as a scripting language because of its forgiving syntax and operability with a wide variety of different eco-systems. Python has powerful standard libraries or toolkits such as Pylearn2 and Hebel, which offers a fast, reliable, cross-platform environment for data analysis. With this book, we will get you started with Python data analysis and show you what its advantages are. The book starts by introducing the principles of data analysis and supported libraries, along with NumPy basics for statistic and data processing. Next it provides an overview of the Pandas package and uses its powerful features to solve data processing problems. Moving on, the book takes you through a brief overview of the Matplotlib API and some common plotting functions for DataFrame such as plot. Next, it will teach you to manipulate the time and data structure, and load and store data in a file or database using Python packages. The book will also teach you how to apply powerful packages in Python to process raw data into pure and helpful data using examples. Finally, the book gives you a brief overview of machine learning algorithms, that is, applying data analysis results to make decisions or build helpful products, such as recommendations and predictions using scikit-learn.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with Python Data Analysis
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

The Pandas data structure


Let's first get acquainted with two of Pandas' primary data structures: the Series and the DataFrame. They can handle the majority of use cases in finance, statistic, social science, and many areas of engineering.

Series

A Series is a one-dimensional object similar to an array, list, or column in table. Each item in a Series is assigned to an entry in an index:

>>> s1 = pd.Series(np.random.rand(4),
                   index=['a', 'b', 'c', 'd'])
>>> s1
a    0.6122
b    0.98096
c    0.3350
d    0.7221
dtype: float64

By default, if no index is passed, it will be created to have values ranging from 0 to N-1, where N is the length of the Series:

>>> s2 = pd.Series(np.random.rand(4))
>>> s2
0    0.6913
1    0.8487
2    0.8627
3    0.7286
dtype: float64

We can access the value of a Series by using the index:

>>> s1['c']
0.3350
>>>s1['c'] = 3.14
>>> s1['c', 'a', 'b']
c    3.14
a    0.6122
b    0.98096

This accessing...