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

Summary


In this chapter, you've learned how to implement regular expressions in Python. In addition, you've learned a process for identifying  patterns and building appropriate pattern strings to recognizing particular patterns. To summarize, the first step to approaching a pattern recognition problem is to observe the data and Identify a pattern that can be represented with a regular expression. Once a pattern has been identified, the next step is to build a pattern string to capture the data and verify that the pattern string works well and as expected. Finally, the regular expression should be implemented expression to either clean, extract or filter text data.

This concludes the initial section of the book dealing with a generalized programming approach to data wrangling. In the next two chapters, I will take on a more formulated approach to data wrangling.

In the next chapter, Chapter 6, Cleaning Numerical Data - An Introduction to R and RStudio, I will introduce the R programming language...