Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Ashish Kumar, Gary Dougan
Book Image

Learning Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Ashish Kumar, Gary Dougan

Overview of this book

Social Media and the Internet of Things have resulted in an avalanche of data. Data is powerful but not in its raw form - It needs to be processed and modeled, and Python is one of the most robust tools out there to do so. It has an array of packages for predictive modeling and a suite of IDEs to choose from. Learning to predict who would win, lose, buy, lie, or die with Python is an indispensable skill set to have in this data age. This book is your guide to getting started with Predictive Analytics using Python. You will see how to process data and make predictive models from it. We balance both statistical and mathematical concepts, and implement them in Python using libraries such as pandas, scikit-learn, and numpy. You’ll start by getting an understanding of the basics of predictive modeling, then you will see how to cleanse your data of impurities and get it ready it for predictive modeling. You will also learn more about the best predictive modeling algorithms such as Linear Regression, Decision Trees, and Logistic Regression. Finally, you will see the best practices in predictive modeling, as well as the different applications of predictive modeling in the modern world.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Learning Predictive Analytics with Python
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
Acknowledgments
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
A List of Links
Index

Various methods of importing data in Python


pandas is the Python library/package of choice to import, wrangle, and manipulate datasets. The datasets come in various forms; the most frequent being in the .csv format. The delimiter (a special character that separates the values in a dataset) in a CSV file is a comma. Now we will look at the various methods in which you can read a dataset in Python.

Case 1 – reading a dataset using the read_csv method

Open an IPython Notebook by typing ipython notebook in the command line.

Download the Titanic dataset from the shared Google Drive folder (any of .xls or .xlsx would do). Save this file in a CSV format and we are good to go. This is a very popular dataset that contains information about the passengers travelling on the famous ship Titanic on the fateful sail that saw it sinking. If you wish to know more about this dataset, you can go to the Google Drive folder and look for it.

A common practice is to share a variable description file with the dataset...