Book Image

Python Data Mining Quick Start Guide

By : Nathan Greeneltch
Book Image

Python Data Mining Quick Start Guide

By: Nathan Greeneltch

Overview of this book

Data mining is a necessary and predictable response to the dawn of the information age. It is typically defined as the pattern and/ or trend discovery phase in the data mining pipeline, and Python is a popular tool for performing these tasks as it offers a wide variety of tools for data mining. This book will serve as a quick introduction to the concept of data mining and putting it to practical use with the help of popular Python packages and libraries. You will get a hands-on demonstration of working with different real-world datasets and extracting useful insights from them using popular Python libraries such as NumPy, pandas, scikit-learn, and matplotlib. You will then learn the different stages of data mining such as data loading, cleaning, analysis, and visualization. You will also get a full conceptual description of popular data transformation, clustering, and classification techniques. By the end of this book, you will be able to build an efficient data mining pipeline using Python without any hassle.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)

Installing high-performance Python distribution

Intel Corp has built a bundle of Python libraries with accelerations for High-Performance Computing (HPC) on CPUs. The vast majority of the accelerations come with no code changes, because they are snuck in under the hood. All the concepts and libraries introduced in the rest of the book will run faster in the HPC Intel Python environment. Luckily, Intel has a Conda version of their distribution, so you can add it as a new Conda environment via the following few command lines in the Anaconda prompt:

(base) $ Conda create -n idp -c channel intelpython3_full Python=3
(base) $ Conda activate idp

Full disclosure: I work for Intel, so I won't focus too much on this HPC distribution. I will merely let the performance numbers speak for themselves. See the following graph for raw speedup numbers (optimized versus stock) when using unchanged Scikit-learn code on CPU: