Book Image

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data

By : Megan Squire
Book Image

Mastering Data Mining with Python - Find patterns hidden in your data

By: Megan Squire

Overview of this book

Data mining is an integral part of the data science pipeline. It is the foundation of any successful data-driven strategy – without it, you'll never be able to uncover truly transformative insights. Since data is vital to just about every modern organization, it is worth taking the next step to unlock even greater value and more meaningful understanding. If you already know the fundamentals of data mining with Python, you are now ready to experiment with more interesting, advanced data analytics techniques using Python's easy-to-use interface and extensive range of libraries. In this book, you'll go deeper into many often overlooked areas of data mining, including association rule mining, entity matching, network mining, sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization, topic modeling, and anomaly detection. For each data mining technique, we'll review the state-of-the-art and current best practices before comparing a wide variety of strategies for solving each problem. We will then implement example solutions using real-world data from the domain of software engineering, and we will spend time learning how to understand and interpret the results we get. By the end of this book, you will have solid experience implementing some of the most interesting and relevant data mining techniques available today, and you will have achieved a greater fluency in the important field of Python data analytics.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Mastering Data Mining with Python – Find patterns hidden in your data
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

What are data anomalies?


An anomaly refers to something that is unexpected or a deviation from the norm. The classic example of an anomaly in data is an outlier, which is a data point that is distant in some way from the other data points in the collection. In addition to outliers, other types of anomalies could include data that is unexpectedly missing, or data that exhibits errors. In the grand scheme of the data mining process that we outlined in Chapter 1, Expanding Your Data Mining Toolbox, detecting data anomalies could be considered part of the data cleaning step, although in this chapter we will find that sometimes using data analysis techniques actually helps us with this cleaning task. In the next few pages, we will take a tour through these different types of anomalies, show what they might look like with real data examples, discuss why they happen, and outline a few simple ways to detect them.

Missing data

Even though missing data is not always the first thing people think of...