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 binary format


We can read and write binary serialization of Python objects with the pickle module, which can be found in the standard library. Object serialization can be useful, if you work with objects that take a long time to create, like some machine learning models. By pickling such objects, subsequent access to this model can be made faster. It also allows you to distribute Python objects in a standardized way.

Pandas includes support for pickling out of the box. The relevant methods are the read_pickle() and to_pickle() functions to read and write data from and to files easily. Those methods will write data to disk in the pickle format, which is a convenient short-term storage format:

>>> df_ex3.to_pickle('example_data/ex_06-03.out')
>>> pd.read_pickle('example_data/ex_06-03.out')
        1  2       3    4
0
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...