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


As in the previous chapter, all exercises will be completed using a single R script called dplyr_intro.R. This chapter will include two demonstrations. The first of these is a comparison of fuel economy and gas prices. The second demonstration is a rewrite of some of the work from Chapter 6 using the dplyr library.

The finished product from this chapter, along with all of the exercises from this book, is available in the code folder of the external resources. All of the external resources in this book can be accessed from the Google Drive folder at the following link: https://goo.gl/8S58ra.

Data

For the demonstrations in this chapter three datasets will be used. The first of these is a dataset of fuel economy data for various vehicle models. The fuel economy dataset is made available by the U.S. Department of Energy. The fuel economy dataset has a large number of non descriptive data variables, so I've also included a link to the description of the data in the external resources...