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

Summary

In this chapter we learned the basics of regression. We mainly covered linear regression, which is one of the easier-to-use models and is easier to interpret. The assumptions for linear regression were discussed, including linear relationships between the features and target, normal distributions of data, no multicollinearity, no autocorrelation of the target, and homoscedasticity (a uniform spread of residuals among target values). We saw how we can use regularization with linear regression to select features with L1 or Lasso regularization, since it will move some coefficients to 0. We also saw how we can try L2 or Ridge regression as well as using a combination of L1 and L2 with ElasticNet.

We saw how other sklearn models can be used for regression as well and demonstrated the KNN model for this. Additionally, the statsmodels package was used for linear regression to be able to get p-values for the statistical significance of our coefficients. Metrics for evaluating...