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

Feature engineering

When trying to improve performance, we may also consider ways to provide the best features (model inputs) to our model through the process of feature engineering. The Preprocessing data section in Chapter 9, Getting Started with Machine Learning in Python, introduced us to feature transformation when we scaled, encoded, and imputed our data. Unfortunately, feature transformation may mute some elements of our data that we want to use in our model, such as the unscaled value of the mean of a specific feature. For this situation, we can create a new feature with this value; this and other new features are added during feature construction (sometimes called feature creation).

Feature selection is the process of determining which features to train the model on. This can be done manually or through another process, such as machine learning. When looking to choose...