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 discussed how to join dataframes, how to determine the data we will lose for each type of join using set operations, and how to query dataframes as we would a database. We then went over some more involved transformations on our columns, such as binning and clipping based on thresholds, and how to do so efficiently with the apply() method. We also learned the importance of vectorized operations in writing efficient pandas code. Then, we explored window calculations and using pipes for cleaner code. Our discussion on window calculations served as a primer for aggregating across whole dataframes and by groups. We also went over how to generate pivot tables and crosstabs. Finally, we looked at some time series-specific functionality in pandas for everything from selection and aggregation to merging.

In the next chapter, we will cover visualization, which...