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

Text preprocessing

Before we undertake text analysis, it's often helpful to undertake some common cleaning and preprocessing steps.

This often includes:

  • Lowercasing
  • Removing punctuation, whitespaces, and numbers
  • Removing other specific text patterns (for example, emails)
  • Removing stop words
  • Stemming or lemmatization

Cleaning and preparing text can improve the performance of ML algorithms as well as make it easier to understand the results of analysis. We'll cover the cleaning and preparation steps we have listed in order.

Basic text cleaning

First, lowercasing is quite easy in Python. We simply take a string variable and use the built-in .lower() method. We'll use the book War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy for our text since it's one of the most famous long books. Perhaps we can draw some conclusions about the topics of the book without reading it. The Project Gutenberg website (https://www.gutenberg.org/) will...