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

Fundamental formats

We have already learned about the basics of text data and binary data. In this section, we'll look at these formats in a bit more detail and introduce some additional important data structures.

Text data

Earlier, we mentioned that, in general, text data can be viewed in a text editor. Text files can often be recognized by their file extensions; common ones include .csv (comma separated), .txt (plain text), .sql (SQL database script files), and others. Note that the extension is only a convention and does not guarantee the format of the contents. For example, it's not unusual to receive files with .txt extensions that are in .csv format.

However, there is an additional complexity that may arise, depending on how the data was created and stored. Text data may appear the same but be stored in different binary versions of each character. These binary representations are called encodings, and in most cases, you will find data encoded in UTF-8 format...