Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By : Allan Visochek
Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By: Allan Visochek

Overview of this book

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them. You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases. The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Logistical overview


In this chapter, I will do a demonstration of a single program called process_data.py. The process_data.py program will read a JSON file containing the data for this chapter, extract some of the variables from the data and output a new dataset to an output JSON file.

At the end of the chapter, I will demonstrate an alternative version of process_data.py called process_data2.py that allows for external specification of the input and output filenames.

The finished product for all of the code is available in the code folder of the external resources. All external resources are available at the following link: https://goo.gl/8S58ra.

Installation requirements

For this chapter, you will need the following:

  • Atom, an open source text editor created by GitHub
  • The latest version of Python 3

Links and guidelines for all of the installation requirements are made available in the Installation a part of the reference material. Visit https://goo.gl/8S58ra and find the Atom and Python 3 headlines...