Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python - Second Edition

By : Stephen Klosterman
Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python - Second Edition

By: Stephen Klosterman

Overview of this book

If data is the new oil, then machine learning is the drill. As companies gain access to ever-increasing quantities of raw data, the ability to deliver state-of-the-art predictive models that support business decision-making becomes more and more valuable. In this book, you’ll work on an end-to-end project based around a realistic data set and split up into bite-sized practical exercises. This creates a case-study approach that simulates the working conditions you’ll experience in real-world data science projects. You’ll learn how to use key Python packages, including pandas, Matplotlib, and scikit-learn, and master the process of data exploration and data processing, before moving on to fitting, evaluating, and tuning algorithms such as regularized logistic regression and random forest. Now in its second edition, this book will take you through the end-to-end process of exploring data and delivering machine learning models. Updated for 2021, this edition includes brand new content on XGBoost, SHAP values, algorithmic fairness, and the ethical concerns of deploying a model in the real world. By the end of this data science book, you’ll have the skills, understanding, and confidence to build your own machine learning models and gain insights from real data.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Preface

Summary

In this introductory chapter, we made extensive use of pandas to load and explore the case study data. We learned how to check for basic consistency and correctness by using a combination of statistical summaries and visualizations. We answered such questions as "Are the unique account IDs truly unique?", "Is there any missing data that has been given a fill value?", and "Do the values of the features make sense given their definition?"

You may notice that we spent nearly all of this chapter identifying and correcting issues with our dataset. This is often the most time-consuming stage of a data science project. While it is not necessarily the most exciting part of the job, it gives you the raw materials necessary to build exciting models and insights. These will be the subjects of most of the rest of this book.

Mastery of software tools and mathematical concepts is what allows you to execute data science projects, at a technical level. However...