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


Time series can be found everywhere; if you analyze the stock market, sunspot occurrences, or river flows, you are observing phenomena that are stretched in time. It is almost inevitable that any data scientist throughout his or her career will deal with time series data at some point. In this chapter, we will see various techniques of handling, analyzing, and building models for time series.

The datasets for this chapter come from the web archive of river flows, which can be accessed here:

http://ftp.uni-bayreuth.de/math/statlib/datasets/riverflow

The archive is essentially a shell script that we processed to create the datasets for this chapter. In order to create the raw files from the archive, you can use Cygwin (on Windows) or Terminal on Mac/Linux and execute the following command (assuming that you save the archive in riverflows.webarchive):

sh riverflow.webarchive