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)

An end-to-end example of data mining in Python

Let's start with a full end-to-end example demonstrating the topics and strategies covered in the rest of the book. Subsequent chapters will go into further detail on each part of the analytical process. I suggest that you read through this example fully before moving on in the book.

Loading data into memory – viewing and managing with ease using pandas

First, we will need to load data into memory so that Python can interact with it. Pandas will be our data management and manipulation library:

# load data into Pandas
import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("./data/iris.csv")

Let's use some built-in pandas features to do sanity checks on our data load and...