Book Image

Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas

By : Stefanie Molin
Book Image

Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas

By: Stefanie Molin

Overview of this book

Data analysis has become a necessary skill in a variety of domains where knowing how to work with data and extract insights can generate significant value. Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas will show you how to analyze your data, get started with machine learning, and work effectively with Python libraries often used for data science, such as pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, seaborn, and scikit-learn. Using real-world datasets, you will learn how to use the powerful pandas library to perform data wrangling to reshape, clean, and aggregate your data. Then, you will be able to conduct exploratory data analysis by calculating summary statistics and visualizing the data to find patterns. In the concluding chapters, you will explore some applications of anomaly detection, regression, clustering, and classification using scikit-learn to make predictions based on past data. By the end of this book, you will be equipped with the skills you need to use pandas to ensure the veracity of your data, visualize it for effective decision-making, and reliably reproduce analyses across multiple datasets.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Pandas
4
Section 2: Using Pandas for Data Analysis
9
Section 3: Applications - Real-World Analyses Using Pandas
12
Section 4: Introduction to Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn
16
Section 5: Additional Resources
18
Solutions

Clustering

We use clustering to divide our data points into groups of similar points. The points in each group are more like their fellow group members than those of other groups. Clustering is commonly used for tasks such as recommendation systems (think of how Netflix recommends what to watch based on what other people who've watched similar things are watching) and market segmentation.

For example, say we work at an online retailer and want to segment our website users for more targeted marketing efforts; we can gather data on time spent on the site, page visits, products viewed, products purchased, and much more. Then, we can have an unsupervised clustering algorithm find groups of users with similar behavior; if we make three groups, we can come up with labels for each group according to its behavior:

Since we can use clustering for unsupervised learning, we will need...