Book Image

Mastering Python Data Analysis

By : Magnus Vilhelm Persson
Book Image

Mastering Python Data Analysis

By: Magnus Vilhelm Persson

Overview of this book

Python, a multi-paradigm programming language, has become the language of choice for data scientists for data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Ever imagined how to become an expert at effectively approaching data analysis problems, solving them, and extracting all of the available information from your data? Well, look no further, this is the book you want! Through this comprehensive guide, you will explore data and present results and conclusions from statistical analysis in a meaningful way. You’ll be able to quickly and accurately perform the hands-on sorting, reduction, and subsequent analysis, and fully appreciate how data analysis methods can support business decision-making. You’ll start off by learning about the tools available for data analysis in Python and will then explore the statistical models that are used to identify patterns in data. Gradually, you’ll move on to review statistical inference using Python, Pandas, and SciPy. After that, we’ll focus on performing regression using computational tools and you’ll get to understand the problem of identifying clusters in data in an algorithmic way. Finally, we delve into advanced techniques to quantify cause and effect using Bayesian methods and you’ll discover how to use Python’s tools for supervised machine learning.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering Python Data Analysis
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Univariate data


We are now ready to start playing with the data. A good way to get an initial feeling of the data is to create graphical representations with the aim of getting an understanding of the shape of its distribution. The word distribution has a technical meaning in data analysis, but we are not concerned with this kind of detail now. We are using this word in the informal sense of how the set of values in our data is distributed.

To start with the simplest case, we look at the variables in the data individually without, at first, worrying about relationships between variables. When we look at a single variable, we say that we are dealing with univariate data. So, this is the case that we will consider in this section.

Histograms

A histogram is a standard way of displaying the distribution of quantitative data, that is, data that can be represented in terms of real numbers or integers. (Notice that integers can also be used to indicate some types of categorical data.) A histogram...