Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By : Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK
Book Image

Big Data Analysis with Python

By: Ivan Marin, Ankit Shukla, Sarang VK

Overview of this book

Processing big data in real time is challenging due to scalability, information inconsistency, and fault tolerance. Big Data Analysis with Python teaches you how to use tools that can control this data avalanche for you. With this book, you'll learn practical techniques to aggregate data into useful dimensions for posterior analysis, extract statistical measurements, and transform datasets into features for other systems. The book begins with an introduction to data manipulation in Python using pandas. You'll then get familiar with statistical analysis and plotting techniques. With multiple hands-on activities in store, you'll be able to analyze data that is distributed on several computers by using Dask. As you progress, you'll study how to aggregate data for plots when the entire data cannot be accommodated in memory. You'll also explore Hadoop (HDFS and YARN), which will help you tackle larger datasets. The book also covers Spark and explains how it interacts with other tools. By the end of this book, you'll be able to bootstrap your own Python environment, process large files, and manipulate data to generate statistics, metrics, and graphs.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)
Big Data Analysis with Python
Preface

Summary


In this chapter, we have seen the importance of creating meaningful and interesting visualizations when analyzing data. A good data visualization can immensely help the analyst's job, representing data in a way that can reach larger audiences and explain concepts that could be hard to translate into words or to represent with tables.

A graph, to be effective as a data visualization tool, must show the data, avoid distortions, make understanding large datasets easy, and have a clear purpose, such as description or exploration. The main goal of a graph is to communicate data, so the analyst must keep that in mind when creating a graph. A useful graph is more desirable than a beautiful one.

We demonstrated some kinds of graphs commonly used in analysis: the line graph, the scatter plot, the histogram, and the boxplot. Each graph has its purpose and application, depending on the data and the goal. We have also shown how to create graphs directly from Matplotlib, from pandas, or a combination...