Book Image

Practical Data Science with Python

By : Nathan George
Book Image

Practical Data Science with Python

By: Nathan George

Overview of this book

Practical Data Science with Python teaches you core data science concepts, with real-world and realistic examples, and strengthens your grip on the basic as well as advanced principles of data preparation and storage, statistics, probability theory, machine learning, and Python programming, helping you build a solid foundation to gain proficiency in data science. The book starts with an overview of basic Python skills and then introduces foundational data science techniques, followed by a thorough explanation of the Python code needed to execute the techniques. You'll understand the code by working through the examples. The code has been broken down into small chunks (a few lines or a function at a time) to enable thorough discussion. As you progress, you will learn how to perform data analysis while exploring the functionalities of key data science Python packages, including pandas, SciPy, and scikit-learn. Finally, the book covers ethics and privacy concerns in data science and suggests resources for improving data science skills, as well as ways to stay up to date on new data science developments. By the end of the book, you should be able to comfortably use Python for basic data science projects and should have the skills to execute the data science process on any data source.
Table of Contents (30 chapters)
1
Part I - An Introduction and the Basics
4
Part II - Dealing with Data
10
Part III - Statistics for Data Science
13
Part IV - Machine Learning
21
Part V - Text Analysis and Reporting
24
Part VI - Wrapping Up
28
Other Books You May Enjoy
29
Index

Machine learning classification algorithms

There are many machine learning algorithms, and new algorithms are being created all the time. Machine learning algorithms take input data and learn, fit, or train during a training phase. Then we use the statistical patterns learned from the data to make predictions during what is called "inference." We will cover some of the basic and simple classification algorithms here:

  • Logistic regression
  • Naïve Bayes
  • k-nearest neighbors (KNN)

The idea with these algorithms is that we give them labeled training data. This means that we have our features (inputs) and a target or label (output). The target should be a class, which could be binary (1 or 0) or multiclass (0 through the number of classes). The numbers 0 and 1 (and others for multiclass classification) for the target correspond to our different classes. For binary classification, this can be something like a payment default, approval to take a...