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

Classification

The goal of classification is to determine how to label data using a set of discrete labels. This probably sounds similar to supervised clustering; however, in this case, we don't care how close members of the groups are spatially. Instead, we concern ourselves with classifying them with the correct class label. Remember, in Chapter 8, Rule-Based Anomaly Detection, when we classified the IP addresses as hacker or not hacker? We didn't care how well-defined clusters of IP addresses were—we just wanted to find the hackers.

Just as with regression, scikit-learn provides many algorithms for classification tasks. These are spread across modules, but will usually say Classifier at the end for classification tasks, as opposed to Regressor for regression tasks. Some common methods are logistic regression, support vector machines (SVMs), k-NN, decision trees...