Book Image

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with Python

By : Suresh Kumar Mukhiya, Usman Ahmed
Book Image

Hands-On Exploratory Data Analysis with Python

By: Suresh Kumar Mukhiya, Usman Ahmed

Overview of this book

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is an approach to data analysis that involves the application of diverse techniques to gain insights into a dataset. This book will help you gain practical knowledge of the main pillars of EDA - data cleaning, data preparation, data exploration, and data visualization. You’ll start by performing EDA using open source datasets and perform simple to advanced analyses to turn data into meaningful insights. You’ll then learn various descriptive statistical techniques to describe the basic characteristics of data and progress to performing EDA on time-series data. As you advance, you’ll learn how to implement EDA techniques for model development and evaluation and build predictive models to visualize results. Using Python for data analysis, you’ll work with real-world datasets, understand data, summarize its characteristics, and visualize it for business intelligence. By the end of this EDA book, you’ll have developed the skills required to carry out a preliminary investigation on any dataset, yield insights into data, present your results with visual aids, and build a model that correctly predicts future outcomes.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Fundamentals of EDA
6
Section 2: Descriptive Statistics
11
Section 3: Model Development and Evaluation

Merging database-style dataframes

Many beginner developers get confused when working with pandas dataframes, especially regarding when to use append, concat, merge, or join. In this section, we are going to check out the separate use cases for each of these.

Let's assume that you are working at a university as a professor teaching a Software Engineering course and an Introduction to Machine Learning course, and there are enough students to split into two classes. The examination for each class was done in two separate buildings and graded by two different professors. They gave you two different dataframes. In the first example, let's only consider one subject— the Software Engineering course.

Check out the following screenshot:

In the preceding dataset, the first column contains information about student identifiers and the second column contains their respective...