Book Image

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Book Image

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Overview of this book

Data analysis is the process of applying logical and analytical reasoning to study each component of data. Python is a multi-domain, high-level, programming language. It’s often used as a scripting language because of its forgiving syntax and operability with a wide variety of different eco-systems. Python has powerful standard libraries or toolkits such as Pylearn2 and Hebel, which offers a fast, reliable, cross-platform environment for data analysis. With this book, we will get you started with Python data analysis and show you what its advantages are. The book starts by introducing the principles of data analysis and supported libraries, along with NumPy basics for statistic and data processing. Next it provides an overview of the Pandas package and uses its powerful features to solve data processing problems. Moving on, the book takes you through a brief overview of the Matplotlib API and some common plotting functions for DataFrame such as plot. Next, it will teach you to manipulate the time and data structure, and load and store data in a file or database using Python packages. The book will also teach you how to apply powerful packages in Python to process raw data into pure and helpful data using examples. Finally, the book gives you a brief overview of machine learning algorithms, that is, applying data analysis results to make decisions or build helpful products, such as recommendations and predictions using scikit-learn.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Getting Started with Python Data Analysis
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Chapter 2. NumPy Arrays and Vectorized Computation

NumPy is the fundamental package supported for presenting and computing data with high performance in Python. It provides some interesting features as follows:

  • Extension package to Python for multidimensional arrays (ndarrays), various derived objects (such as masked arrays), matrices providing vectorization operations, and broadcasting capabilities. Vectorization can significantly increase the performance of array computations by taking advantage of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD) instruction sets in modern CPUs.

  • Fast and convenient operations on arrays of data, including mathematical manipulation, basic statistical operations, sorting, selecting, linear algebra, random number generation, discrete Fourier transforms, and so on.

  • Efficiency tools that are closer to hardware because of integrating C/C++/Fortran code.

NumPy is a good starting package for you to get familiar with arrays and array-oriented computing in data analysis. Also...