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

Summary


We have finished covering the basics of the Pandas data analysis library. Whenever you learn about a library for data analysis, you need to consider the three parts that we explained in this chapter. Data structures: we have two common data object types in the Pandas library; Series and DataFrames. Method to access and manipulate data objects: Pandas supports many way to select, set or slice subsets of data object. However, the general mechanism is using index labels or the positions of items to identify values. Functions and utilities: They are the most important part of a powerful library. In this chapter, we covered all common supported functions of Pandas which allow us compute statistics on data easily. The library also has a lot of other useful functions and utilities that we could not explain in this chapter. We encourage you to start your own research, if you want to expand your experience with Pandas. It helps us to process large data in an optimized way. You will see more...