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

Interacting with data in text format


Text is a great medium and it's a simple way to exchange information. The following statement is taken from a quote attributed to Doug McIlroy: Write programs to handle text streams, because that is the universal interface.

In this section we will start reading and writing data from and to text files.

Reading data from text format

Normally, the raw data logs of a system are stored in multiple text files, which can accumulate a large amount of information over time. Thankfully, it is simple to interact with these kinds of files in Python.

Pandas supports a number of functions for reading data from a text file into a DataFrame object. The most simple one is the read_csv() function. Let's start with a small example file:

$ cat example_data/ex_06-01.txt
Name,age,major_id,sex,hometown
Nam,7,1,male,hcm
Mai,11,1,female,hcm
Lan,25,3,female,hn
Hung,42,3,male,tn
Nghia,26,3,male,dn
Vinh,39,3,male,vl
Hong,28,4,female,dn

Tip

The cat is the Unix shell command that can...