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

An introduction to matplotlib

The plotting capabilities in pandas and seaborn are powered by matplotlib; both of these packages provide wrappers around the lower-level functionality in matplotlib. Consequently, we have many visualization options at our fingertips with minimal code to write; however, this comes at a price: reduced flexibility in what we can create.

We may find that the pandas or seaborn implementation isn't quite meeting our needs, and, indeed, it may be impossible to override a particular setting after creating the plot with them, meaning we will have to do some of the legwork with matplotlib. Therefore, it would greatly benefit us to have some understanding of how matplotlib works. Additionally, many of the tweaks to the final appearance of the visualization will be handled with matplotlib commands, which we will discuss in the next chapter.

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