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

An introduction to matplotlib

The plotting capabilities in pandas and seaborn are powered by matplotlib: both of these packages provide wrappers around the lower-level functionality in matplotlib. Consequently, we have many visualization options at our fingertips with minimal code to write; however, this comes at a price: reduced flexibility in what we can create.

We may find that the pandas or seaborn implementation isn't quite meeting our needs, and, indeed, it may be impossible to override a particular setting after creating the plot with them, meaning we will have to do some of the legwork with matplotlib. Additionally, many of the tweaks that will be made to the final appearance of the visualization will be handled with matplotlib commands, which we will discuss in the next chapter. Therefore, it would greatly benefit us to have some understanding of how matplotlib works.

The basics

The matplotlib package is rather large since it encompasses quite a bit of functionality...