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

Loading and Wrangling Data with Pandas and NumPy

Data sources come in many formats: plain text files, CSVs, SQL databases, Excel files, and many more. We saw how to deal with some of these data sources in the last chapter, but there is one library in Python that takes the cake when it comes to data preparation: pandas. The pandas library is a core tool for a data scientist, and we will learn how to use it effectively in this chapter. We will learn about:

  • Loading data from and saving data to several different data source types
  • Some basic exploratory data analysis (EDA) and plotting with pandas
  • Preparing and cleaning data for later use, including the imputation of missing data (filling in missing values) and outlier detection
  • Essential data wrangling tools such as filtering, groupby, and replace

Overall, this chapter will be another foundational chapter in your data science journey, giving you the tools necessary to get started working with data...