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

k-anonymity, l-diversity, and t-closeness

There are a few methodologies for protecting privacy with data, especially if we are going to be publishing data or sharing it with others. For example, we may need to send data to a service like Amazon Mechanical Turk for data labeling, and we don't want to have a data breach as a result of sending the data there. The first methodology for protecting privacy is k-anonymity, which was first introduced in 1998. This says that if we have at least k records with identical tuples of quasi-identifiers (QIs) then we have k-anonymity (where k is a positive integer). QIs are PII that has been semi-anonymized. For example, age and zip code could make a tuple of quasi-identifiers by converting ages to ranges and removing the last few digits of zip codes.

As an example, let's look at the simple dataset in the GitHub repository for this chapter of the book. This is a mock dataset that has HIV test results of individuals. Let's first...