Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By : Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou
Book Image

Numerical Computing with Python

By: Pratap Dangeti, Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim, Theodore Petrou

Overview of this book

Data mining, or parsing the data to extract useful insights, is a niche skill that can transform your career as a data scientist Python is a flexible programming language that is equipped with a strong suite of libraries and toolkits, and gives you the perfect platform to sift through your data and mine the insights you seek. This Learning Path is designed to familiarize you with the Python libraries and the underlying statistics that you need to get comfortable with data mining. You will learn how to use Pandas, Python's popular library to analyze different kinds of data, and leverage the power of Matplotlib to generate appealing and impressive visualizations for the insights you have derived. You will also explore different machine learning techniques and statistics that enable you to build powerful predictive models. By the end of this Learning Path, you will have the perfect foundation to take your data mining skills to the next level and set yourself on the path to become a sought-after data science professional. This Learning Path includes content from the following Packt products: • Statistics for Machine Learning by Pratap Dangeti • Matplotlib 2.x By Example by Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim • Pandas Cookbook by Theodore Petrou
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Title Page
Contributors
About Packt
Preface
Index

Customizing an aggregation function


Pandas provides a number of the most common aggregation functions for you to use with the groupby object. At some point, you will need to write your own customized user-defined functions that don't exist in pandas or NumPy.

Getting ready

In this recipe, we use the college dataset to calculate the mean and standard deviation of the undergraduate student population per state. We then use this information to find the maximum number of standard deviations from the mean that any single population value is per state.

How to do it...

  1. Read in the college dataset, and find the mean and standard deviation of the undergraduate population by state:
>>> college = pd.read_csv('data/college.csv')
>>> college.groupby('STABBR')['UGDS'].agg(['mean', 'std']) \
                                     .round(0).head()
  1. This output isn't quite what we desire. We are not looking for the mean and standard deviations of the entire group but the maximum number of standard...