Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By : Alvaro Fuentes
Book Image

Hands-On Predictive Analytics with Python

By: Alvaro Fuentes

Overview of this book

Predictive analytics is an applied field that employs a variety of quantitative methods using data to make predictions. It involves much more than just throwing data onto a computer to build a model. This book provides practical coverage to help you understand the most important concepts of predictive analytics. Using practical, step-by-step examples, we build predictive analytics solutions while using cutting-edge Python tools and packages. The book's step-by-step approach starts by defining the problem and moves on to identifying relevant data. We will also be performing data preparation, exploring and visualizing relationships, building models, tuning, evaluating, and deploying model. Each stage has relevant practical examples and efficient Python code. You will work with models such as KNN, Random Forests, and neural networks using the most important libraries in Python's data science stack: NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, Keras, Dash, and so on. In addition to hands-on code examples, you will find intuitive explanations of the inner workings of the main techniques and algorithms used in predictive analytics. By the end of this book, you will be all set to build high-performance predictive analytics solutions using Python programming.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Univariate EDA

As the name implies, univariate EDA is EDA applied to a single feature (variable). Carrying out univariate EDA on all the features of your dataset is always the first step, and it is almost a mandatory activity. The goal here is to understand each of the features individually, their characteristics in terms of typical values, variation, distribution, and so on.

Let's use our diamond prices dataset. As always, the first step is to import the libraries that we'll use in this notebook, as follows:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import os
%matplotlib inline

Now, let's load our raw diamond prices dataset. Since this is a new chapter, we will perform all the transformations we did in the previous chapter so that we can work with the transformed dataset, as follows:

DATA_DIR = '../data'
FILE_NAME...