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


Graphs are everywhere; when you get in your car and drive around using a GPS, you perhaps do not even realize that it is solving a graph problem to get you from point A to point B over the shortest path or in the shortest time.

The origins of graph theory reach the 18th century when Leonard Euler proposed the solution to the Königsberg bridge problem. (To read more on the topic, you can refer to http://www2.gsu.edu/~matgtc/origin%20of%20graph%20theory.pdf.) From that point onward, some of the problems that were deemed unsolvable could be solved; the Internet (or even your local network) can be viewed and analyzed as a graph, scheduling problems that airlines solve can be modeled as a graph, or (as we will see) a social network is much easier to handle if we realize that it is a graph.

Graphs are structures consisting of nodes (sometimes called vertices) and edges (sometimes called arcs or lines) that connect two nodes:

The preceding example shows the simplest network possible,...