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

Summary

In this chapter, we reviewed various techniques we can employ to improve the performance of our models. We learned how to use grid search to find the best hyperparameters in a search space, and how to tune our model using the scoring metric of our choosing with GridSearchCV. This means we don't have to accept the default in the score() method of our model and can customize it to our needs.

In our discussion of feature engineering, we learned how to reduce the dimensionality of our data using techniques such as PCA and feature selection. We saw how to use PolynomialFeatures to add interaction terms to models with categorical and numerical features. Next, we learned how to use a FeatureUnion to augment our training data with transformed features. In addition, we saw how decision trees can help us understand which features in the data contribute most to the classification...