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

Automated reporting and dashboarding

When dealing with data that is updated periodically and frequently, it's helpful to use automation tools to generate data reports. This saves us the trouble of constantly re-running a repetitive analysis. There are some different ways to deal with sharing data: reports and dashboarding.

Automated reporting options

Reports will usually consist of something like a PDF or an other document (such as MS Word) or a spreadsheet like MS Excel. We already saw how we can do some work with Excel using pandas, but for more powerful control of Excel, we can use other Python packages as well:

  • xlsxwriter (easily generates charts; this works well with pandas' ExcelWriter)
  • openpyxl (also allows for charts)

There are also other Excel Python packages. The site http://www.python-excel.org/ is one place with a list of many of these packages. The win32com package can also be used to read and write Excel files on Windows, but...