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

Understanding NumPy basics

Another library that's useful for dealing with data is NumPy (numpy). The name stands for "Numeric Python," and it has many tools for advanced mathematical calculations and the representation of numeric data. NumPy is used by other Python packages for computations, such as the scikit-learn machine learning library. In fact, pandas is built on top of NumPy. With NumPy, we'll learn:

  • How data is represented in NumPy
  • How to use some of NumPy's mathematical function and features
  • How NumPy relates to and works with pandas

The pandas library actually stores its data as NumPy arrays. An array is similar to a list, but has more capabilities and properties. We can extract an array from our DataFrame like so:

close_array = btc_df['close'].values

This gives us a NumPy array:

array([   93.033     ,   103.999     ,   118.22935407, ...,
       17211.69580098, 17171.        , 17686.840768  ...