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

Tokenizing and normalizing text


Extracting the contents of the page is just the first step. Before we get to the fun part of analyzing what the article contains (or, if you looked at blog posts, what they are about), we need to split the whole article into sentences and further into words.

Having done so, we would still face another issue; in any of the text, we would see sentences in different tenses, people using the passive voice, or some rarely seen grammatical constructs. For the purpose of extracting the topic or analyzing the sentiment, we do not really need to see words said and says separately—the word say would be enough. Thus, we will also be looking at normalizing the text, that is, bringing all the different versions of the same word to some common form.

Getting ready

To execute this recipe, all you need is the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK). Before we start, however, you need to make sure that the NLTK module is present on your machine. If you are using Anaconda, this is simple...