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

Translating a Business Problem into Measurable Metrics and Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA)


If a specific business problem comes to us, we need to identify the KPIs that define that business problem and study the data related to it. Beyond generating KPIs related to the problem, looking into the trends and quantifying the problem through Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) methods will be the next step.

The approach to explore KPIs is as follows:

  • Data gathering

  • Analysis of data generation

  • KPI visualization

  • Feature importance

Data Gathering

The data that is required for analyzing the problem is part of defining the business problem. However, the selection of attributes from the data will change according to the business problem. Consider the following examples:

  • If it is a recommendation engine or churn analysis of customers, we need to look into historical purchases and Know Your Customer (KYC) data, among other data.

  • If it is related to forecasting demand, we need to look into daily sales data.

It needs...