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)

Collecting, Exploring, and Visualizing Data

As a first step, it is important to understand how to acquire data and how to access it in computer memory. Once data is loaded, sound practices for exploration can save time downstream. This chapter will start by showing you how to interact with different data sources such as databases, disks, and streaming. Despite the practicality of these topics, many new analysts overlook them. Indeed, you cannot actually do any work if you cannot get past this beginning step. The second half of the chapter will introduce you to Seaborn for visualizing data, and then recommend types of plots for relevant and popular problem statements.

The following topics will be covered in this chapter:

  • Types of data sources and loading into pandas
  • Access, search, and sanity checks with pandas
  • Basic plotting in Seaborn
  • Relevant types of plots for visualizing...