Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By : Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose
Book Image

Data Science Using Python and R

By: Chantal D. Larose, Daniel T. Larose

Overview of this book

Data science is hot. Bloomberg named a data scientist as the ‘hottest job in America’. Python and R are the top two open-source data science tools using which you can produce hands-on solutions to real-world business problems, using state-of-the-art techniques. Each chapter in the book presents step-by-step instructions and walkthroughs for solving data science problems using Python and R. You’ll learn how to prepare data, perform exploratory data analysis, and prepare to model the data. As you progress, you’ll explore what are decision trees and how to use them. You’ll also learn about model evaluation, misclassification costs, naïve Bayes classification, and neural networks. The later chapters provide comprehensive information about clustering, regression modeling, dimension reduction, and association rules mining. The book also throws light on exciting new topics, such as random forests and general linear models. The book emphasizes data-driven error costs to enhance profitability, which avoids the common pitfalls that may cost a company millions of dollars. By the end of this book, you’ll have enough knowledge and confidence to start providing solutions to data science problems using R and Python.
Table of Contents (20 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
17
INDEX
18
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT

3.5 CHANGING MISLEADING FIELD VALUES

The field days_since_previous is a count of the number of days since the client was last contacted from a previous campaign. This field is clearly numeric, so we can look at a histogram4 of days_since_previous provided by R in Figure 3.1. Note that most of the data values are near 1000, with a minority of values near zero. It turns out that the database administrator used the code 999 to represent customers who had not been contacted previously. Thus, we need to change the field value 999 to missing, which is done as follows in Python and R.

Image described by caption.

Figure 3.1 Histogram from R of days_since_previous, with most values near 1000.

3.5.1 How to Change Misleading Field Values Using Python

If you did not open the pandas package or read in the data set, as described in the previous Python section, do so now. We also need to import the numpy package for this section.

import numpy as np

We need to identify all records with days_since_previous value of 999 and...