Book Image

The Pandas Workshop

By : Blaine Bateman, Saikat Basak, Thomas V. Joseph, William So
5 (1)
Book Image

The Pandas Workshop

5 (1)
By: Blaine Bateman, Saikat Basak, Thomas V. Joseph, William So

Overview of this book

The Pandas Workshop will teach you how to be more productive with data and generate real business insights to inform your decision-making. You will be guided through real-world data science problems and shown how to apply key techniques in the context of realistic examples and exercises. Engaging activities will then challenge you to apply your new skills in a way that prepares you for real data science projects. You’ll see how experienced data scientists tackle a wide range of problems using data analysis with pandas. Unlike other Python books, which focus on theory and spend too long on dry, technical explanations, this workshop is designed to quickly get you to write clean code and build your understanding through hands-on practice. As you work through this Python pandas book, you’ll tackle various real-world scenarios, such as using an air quality dataset to understand the pattern of nitrogen dioxide emissions in a city, as well as analyzing transportation data to improve bus transportation services. By the end of this data analytics book, you’ll have the knowledge, skills, and confidence you need to solve your own challenging data science problems with pandas.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Part 1 – Introduction to pandas
6
Part 2 – Working with Data
11
Part 3 – Data Modeling
15
Part 4 – Additional Use Cases for pandas

The need for data structures

Consider that you are working with quarterly gross domestic product (GDP) data for the US. A natural way to think about the data and work with it would be to use it in a table. An example might be viewing the data in spreadsheet software, as shown here:

Figure 2.1 – Tabular data

In Figure 2.1, you see two columns of data. The spreadsheet software has labeled the columns with letters and the rows with numbers. In addition, the column names representing the data (date, GDP) are present in the first row.

The table shown in Figure 2.1 is a data structure. Having this data in two columns makes it easier to understand and work with. However, in the spreadsheet, it's complicated to work with the data as a single object (a table). This is where pandas gives you an edge over the core Python data structures (and over spreadsheets). As you saw in Chapter 1, Introduction to pandas, in pandas you can refer to the entire dataset...