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

Data Wrangling Documents and Spreadsheets

Now that we have some basic Python and data skills under our belt, let's take a look at how we can work with some common types of data you will see in the wild: documents and spreadsheets. Most organizations use Microsoft Office with Word and Excel, and this generates huge amounts of data. There are also loads of PDF documents out there with valuable information contained within. If our data lies in a pile of Excel and PDF files, then dealing with these types of data becomes necessary when doing data science. Once we have data loaded from these files, it's also useful to have a few basic analysis techniques at the ready. We'll learn data extraction techniques, as well as basic analysis techniques for the text from documents and the data from Excel spreadsheets that we might encounter. Specifically, we'll learn the Python tools and techniques for:

  • Loading Word and PDF documents using the python-docx and PyPDF2...