Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition

By : Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti
Book Image

Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition

By: Luca Massaron, Alberto Boschetti

Overview of this book

Fully expanded and upgraded, the second edition of Python Data Science Essentials takes you through all you need to know to suceed in data science using Python. Get modern insight into the core of Python data, including the latest versions of Jupyter notebooks, NumPy, pandas and scikit-learn. Look beyond the fundamentals with beautiful data visualizations with Seaborn and ggplot, web development with Bottle, and even the new frontiers of deep learning with Theano and TensorFlow. Dive into building your essential Python 3.5 data science toolbox, using a single-source approach that will allow to to work with Python 2.7 as well. Get to grips fast with data munging and preprocessing, and all the techniques you need to load, analyse, and process your data. Finally, get a complete overview of principal machine learning algorithms, graph analysis techniques, and all the visualization and deployment instruments that make it easier to present your results to an audience of both data science experts and business users.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)
Python Data Science Essentials - Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Working with categorical and text data


Typically, you'll find yourself dealing with two main kinds of data: categorical and numerical. Numerical data, such as temperature, amount of money, days of usage, or house number, can be composed of either floating-point numbers (such as 1.0, -2.3, 99.99, and so on) or integers (such as -3, 9, 0, 1, and so on). Each value that the data can assume has a direct relation with others since they're comparable. In other words, you can say that a feature with a value of 2.0 is greater (actually, it is double) than a feature that assumes a value of 1.0. This type of data is very well-defined and comprehensible, with binary operators such as equal to, greater than, and less than.

Note

A key aspect of numerical data is that basic stats are meaningful for it (for example, averages). This does not apply to any other category, making it an important characteristic of this data type

The other type of data you might see in your career is the categorical type (also...