Book Image

Mastering pandas

By : Femi Anthony
Book Image

Mastering pandas

By: Femi Anthony

Overview of this book

<p>Python is a ground breaking language for its simplicity and succinctness, allowing the user to achieve a great deal with a few lines of code, especially compared to other programming languages. The pandas brings these features of Python into the data analysis realm, by providing expressiveness, simplicity, and powerful capabilities for the task of data analysis. By mastering pandas, users will be able to do complex data analysis in a short period of time, as well as illustrate their findings using the rich visualization capabilities of related tools such as IPython and matplotlib.</p> <p>This book is an in-depth guide to the use of pandas for data analysis, for either the seasoned data analysis practitioner or the novice user. It provides a basic introduction to the pandas framework, and takes users through the installation of the library and the IPython interactive environment. Thereafter, you will learn basic as well as advanced features, such as MultiIndexing, modifying data structures, and sampling data, which provide powerful capabilities for data analysis.</p>
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Mastering pandas
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Descriptive statistics versus inferential statistics


In descriptive or summary statistics, we attempt to describe the features of a collection of data in a quantitative way. This is different from inferential or inductive statistics because its aim is to summarize a sample rather than use the data to infer or draw conclusions about the population from which the sample is drawn.