Book Image

Healthcare Analytics Made Simple

By : Vikas (Vik) Kumar, Shameer Khader
Book Image

Healthcare Analytics Made Simple

By: Vikas (Vik) Kumar, Shameer Khader

Overview of this book

In recent years, machine learning technologies and analytics have been widely utilized across the healthcare sector. Healthcare Analytics Made Simple bridges the gap between practising doctors and data scientists. It equips the data scientists’ work with healthcare data and allows them to gain better insight from this data in order to improve healthcare outcomes. This book is a complete overview of machine learning for healthcare analytics, briefly describing the current healthcare landscape, machine learning algorithms, and Python and SQL programming languages. The step-by-step instructions teach you how to obtain real healthcare data and perform descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics using popular Python packages such as pandas and scikit-learn. The latest research results in disease detection and healthcare image analysis are reviewed. By the end of this book, you will understand how to use Python for healthcare data analysis, how to import, collect, clean, and refine data from electronic health record (EHR) surveys, and how to make predictive models with this data through real-world algorithms and code examples.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Variables and types

Basic variable types in Python consist of strings and numeric types. Let's look at both of these types in this section.

Strings

In Python, a string is a variable type that stores text characters such as letters, numbers, special characters, and punctuation. In Python, we use single or double quotation marks to indicate that the variable is a string rather than a number:

var = 'Hello, World!'
print(var)

Strings cannot be used for mathematical operations on numbers. But they can be used for other useful operations, as we see in the following example:

string_1 = '1'
string_2 = '2'
string_sum = string_1 + string_2
print(string_sum)

The result of the preceding code is to print...