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

The use of data science techniques with text spans a few different areas, and the broad field of working with language and text with computers is called NLP. We saw first how we can clean text data using Python and the spaCy package by removing things like punctuation, stop words, and numbers. Lowercasing can be used to condense the same words (regardless of capitalization) into the same count for word frequency analysis. We can also use stemming or lemmatizing to reduce words to a stem or root, which further groups similar words for measuring word frequencies. The spaCy package makes cleaning and lemmatizing easy, and this can be done in a few lines of code.

We then saw how basic analytics, such as word frequency plots, POS tags, and word collocations, can be performed to get an understanding of the text. Zipf's law can be used to analyze text as well, to understand a text's characteristic shape parameter from the Zipfian distribution. Although wordclouds...