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

Introduction


Finance deals with many subjects, such as money, saving, investing, and insurance. In this chapter, we will focus on stock investing because stock price data is abundant. According to academic theory, an average investor should not invest in individual stocks, but in whole markets, for instance, a basket of stocks representing large companies within a country. Economists make several such arguments for this theory. First, financial markets are random; therefore, beating an average basket by picking stocks is very difficult. Second, individual stocks are volatile with wild price swings. These price moves get averaged in a basket, which makes investing in a group of stocks less risky.

We will analyze stock prices, but nothing prevents you from reusing the recipes to analyze mutual funds and exchange traded funds or other financial assets. To keep the analysis simple, I limited the selection to half a dozen stocks for well-known U.S. companies, which are also represented in the...