Book Image

Practical Data Analysis Cookbook

By : Tomasz Drabas
Book Image

Practical Data Analysis Cookbook

By: Tomasz Drabas

Overview of this book

Data analysis is the process of systematically applying statistical and logical techniques to describe and illustrate, condense and recap, and evaluate data. Its importance has been most visible in the sector of information and communication technologies. It is an employee asset in almost all economy sectors. This book provides a rich set of independent recipes that dive into the world of data analytics and modeling using a variety of approaches, tools, and algorithms. You will learn the basics of data handling and modeling, and will build your skills gradually toward more advanced topics such as simulations, raw text processing, social interactions analysis, and more. First, you will learn some easy-to-follow practical techniques on how to read, write, clean, reformat, explore, and understand your data—arguably the most time-consuming (and the most important) tasks for any data scientist. In the second section, different independent recipes delve into intermediate topics such as classification, clustering, predicting, and more. With the help of these easy-to-follow recipes, you will also learn techniques that can easily be expanded to solve other real-life problems such as building recommendation engines or predictive models. In the third section, you will explore more advanced topics: from the field of graph theory through natural language processing, discrete choice modeling to simulations. You will also get to expand your knowledge on identifying fraud origin with the help of a graph, scrape Internet websites, and classify movies based on their reviews. By the end of this book, you will be able to efficiently use the vast array of tools that the Python environment has to offer.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Practical Data Analysis Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introduction


Discrete choice models (DCMs) aim at predicting which alternative a person will choose. The models share similarities with logistic regression although with some fundamental differences in assumptions about the distribution of error terms.

The theory of DCMs has its roots in the random utility theory and assumption that a rational person will always choose an option that will maximize the utility a person gets from choosing such an option.

For example, let's assume that you are to choose between two independent alternatives (that is, such alternatives that do not share any common characteristics); for the sake of this example, we will consider choosing between biking and driving a car to work. It costs nothing to bike to work (we are, of course, assuming that you already have a bike and we do not count the energy that you burn while biking), but the cost of driving a car to work would be $3. However, it takes roughly 45 minutes to get to work on a bike while the same trip using...