Book Image

Python Data Analysis Cookbook

By : Ivan Idris
Book Image

Python Data Analysis Cookbook

By: Ivan Idris

Overview of this book

Data analysis is a rapidly evolving field and Python is a multi-paradigm programming language suitable for object-oriented application development and functional design patterns. As Python offers a range of tools and libraries for all purposes, it has slowly evolved as the primary language for data science, including topics on: data analysis, visualization, and machine learning. Python Data Analysis Cookbook focuses on reproducibility and creating production-ready systems. You will start with recipes that set the foundation for data analysis with libraries such as matplotlib, NumPy, and pandas. You will learn to create visualizations by choosing color maps and palettes then dive into statistical data analysis using distribution algorithms and correlations. You’ll then help you find your way around different data and numerical problems, get to grips with Spark and HDFS, and then set up migration scripts for web mining. In this book, you will dive deeper into recipes on spectral analysis, smoothing, and bootstrapping methods. Moving on, you will learn to rank stocks and check market efficiency, then work with metrics and clusters. You will achieve parallelism to improve system performance by using multiple threads and speeding up your code. By the end of the book, you will be capable of handling various data analysis techniques in Python and devising solutions for problem scenarios.
Table of Contents (23 chapters)
Python Data Analysis Cookbook
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Glossary
Index

Simulating web browsing


Corporate websites are usually made by teams or departments using specialized tools and templates. A lot of the content is generated on the fly and consists of a large part of JavaScript and CSS. This means that even if we download the content, we still have to, at least, evaluate the JavaScript code. One way that we can do this from a Python program is using the Selenium API. Selenium's main purpose is actually testing websites, but nothing stops us from using it to scrape websites.

Instead of scraping a website, we will scrape an IPython Notebook—the test_widget.ipynb file in this book's code bundle. To simulate browsing this web page, we provided a unit test class in test_simulating_browsing.py. In case you wondered, this is not the recommended way to test IPython Notebooks.

For historic reasons, I prefer using XPath to find HTML elements. XPath is a query language, which also works with HTML. This is not the only method, you can also use CSS selectors, tag names...