Book Image

Practical Data Analysis

By : Hector Cuesta
Book Image

Practical Data Analysis

By: Hector Cuesta

Overview of this book

Plenty of small businesses face big amounts of data but lack the internal skills to support quantitative analysis. Understanding how to harness the power of data analysis using the latest open source technology can lead them to providing better customer service, the visualization of customer needs, or even the ability to obtain fresh insights about the performance of previous products. Practical Data Analysis is a book ideal for home and small business users who want to slice and dice the data they have on hand with minimum hassle.Practical Data Analysis is a hands-on guide to understanding the nature of your data and turn it into insight. It will introduce you to the use of machine learning techniques, social networks analytics, and econometrics to help your clients get insights about the pool of data they have at hand. Performing data preparation and processing over several kinds of data such as text, images, graphs, documents, and time series will also be covered.Practical Data Analysis presents a detailed exploration of the current work in data analysis through self-contained projects. First you will explore the basics of data preparation and transformation through OpenRefine. Then you will get started with exploratory data analysis using the D3js visualization framework. You will also be introduced to some of the machine learning techniques such as, classification, regression, and clusterization through practical projects such as spam classification, predicting gold prices, and finding clusters in your Facebook friends' network. You will learn how to solve problems in text classification, simulation, time series forecast, social media, and MapReduce through detailed projects. Finally you will work with large amounts of Twitter data using MapReduce to perform a sentiment analysis implemented in Python and MongoDB. Practical Data Analysis contains a combination of carefully selected algorithms and data scrubbing that enables you to turn your data into insight.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
Practical Data Analysis
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Data formats


When we are working with data for human consumption the easiest way to store it is through text files. In this section, we will present parsing examples of the most common formats such as CSV, JSON, and XML. These examples will be very helpful in the next chapters.

Tip

The dataset used for these examples is a list of Pokémon characters by National Pokedex number, obtained at the URL http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/.

All the scripts and dataset files can be found in the author's GitHub repository available at the URL https://github.com/hmcuesta/PDA_Book/tree/master/Chapter3/.

CSV

CSV is a very simple and common open format for table, such as data, which can be exported and imported by most of the data analysis tools. CSV is a plain text format this means that the file is a sequence of characters, with no data that has to be interpreted instead, for example, binary numbers.

There are many ways to parse a CSV file from Python, and in a moment we will discuss two of them:

The first eight...