Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials

Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials

Overview of this book

The book starts by introducing you to setting up your essential data science toolbox. Then it will guide you across all the data munging and preprocessing phases. This will be done in a manner that explains all the core data science activities related to loading data, transforming and fixing it for analysis, as well as exploring and processing it. Finally, it will complete the overview by presenting you with the main machine learning algorithms, the graph analysis technicalities, and all the visualization instruments that can make your life easier in presenting your results. In this walkthrough, structured as a data science project, you will always be accompanied by clear code and simplified examples to help you understand the underlying mechanics and real-world datasets.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Summary


In this chapter, we discussed how pandas and NumPy can provide you with all the tools to load and effectively munge your data.

We started with pandas and its data structures, DataFrames and Series, and conducted you through to the final NumPy bidimensional array, a data structure suitable for subsequent experimentation and machine learning. In doing so, we touched upon subjects such as the manipulation of vectors and matrices, categorical data encoding, textual data processing, fixing missing data and errors, slicing and dicing, merging, and stacking.

The pandas and NumPy surely offer many more functions than the essential building blocks we presented here—the commands and procedures illustrated. You can now take any available raw data and apply all the cleaning and shaping transformations necessary for your data science project.

In the next chapter, we will take our data operations to the next step. In this chapter, we together overviewed all the essential data munging operations necessary...