Book Image

Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas - Second Edition

By : Stefanie Molin
5 (1)
Book Image

Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas - Second Edition

5 (1)
By: Stefanie Molin

Overview of this book

Extracting valuable business insights is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’, but an essential skill for anyone who handles data in their enterprise. Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas is here to help beginners and those who are migrating their skills into data science get up to speed in no time. This book will show you how to analyze your data, get started with machine learning, and work effectively with the Python libraries often used for data science, such as pandas, NumPy, matplotlib, seaborn, and scikit-learn. Using real-world datasets, you will learn how to use the pandas library to perform data wrangling to reshape, clean, and aggregate your data. Then, you will learn how to conduct exploratory data analysis by calculating summary statistics and visualizing the data to find patterns. In the concluding chapters, you will explore some applications of anomaly detection, regression, clustering, and classification using scikit-learn to make predictions based on past data. This updated edition will equip you with the skills you need to use pandas 1.x to efficiently perform various data manipulation tasks, reliably reproduce analyses, and visualize your data for effective decision making – valuable knowledge that can be applied across multiple domains.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Pandas
4
Section 2: Using Pandas for Data Analysis
9
Section 3: Applications – Real-World Analyses Using Pandas
12
Section 4: Introduction to Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn
16
Section 5: Additional Resources
18
Solutions

Summary

Congratulations on making it through this chapter! Data wrangling may not be the most exciting part of the analytics workflow, but we will spend a lot of time on it, so it's best to be well versed in what pandas has to offer.

In this chapter, we learned more about what data wrangling is (aside from a data science buzzword) and got some firsthand experience with cleaning and reshaping our data. Utilizing the requests library, we once again practiced working with APIs to extract data of interest; then, we used pandas to begin our introduction to data wrangling, which we will continue in the next chapter. Finally, we learned how to deal with duplicate, missing, and invalid data points in various ways and discussed the ramifications of those decisions.

Building on these concepts, in the next chapter, we will learn how to aggregate dataframes and work with time series data. Be sure to complete the end-of-chapter exercises before moving on.