Book Image

Mastering pandas - Second Edition

By : Ashish Kumar
Book Image

Mastering pandas - Second Edition

By: Ashish Kumar

Overview of this book

pandas is a popular Python library used by data scientists and analysts worldwide to manipulate and analyze their data. This book presents useful data manipulation techniques in pandas to perform complex data analysis in various domains. An update to our highly successful previous edition with new features, examples, updated code, and more, this book is an in-depth guide to get the most out of pandas for data analysis. Designed for both intermediate users as well as seasoned practitioners, you will learn advanced data manipulation techniques, such as multi-indexing, modifying data structures, and sampling your data, which allow for powerful analysis and help you gain accurate insights from it. With the help of this book, you will apply pandas to different domains, such as Bayesian statistics, predictive analytics, and time series analysis using an example-based approach. And not just that; you will also learn how to prepare powerful, interactive business reports in pandas using the Jupyter notebook. By the end of this book, you will learn how to perform efficient data analysis using pandas on complex data, and become an expert data analyst or data scientist in the process.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Overview of Data Analysis and pandas
4
Section 2: Data Structures and I/O in pandas
7
Section 3: Mastering Different Data Operations in pandas
12
Section 4: Going a Step Beyond with pandas

Bayesian statistics versus frequentist statistics

In statistics today, there are two schools of thought as to how we interpret data and make statistical inferences. The classical and more dominant approach to date has been what is termed the frequentist approach (refer to Chapter 7, A Tour of Statistics – The Classical Approach). We are looking at the Bayesian approach in this chapter.

What is probability?

At the heart of the debate between the Bayesian and frequentist worldview is the question of how we define probability.

In the frequentist worldview, probability is a notion that is derived from the frequencies of repeated events—for example, when we define the probability of getting heads when a fair coin...