Book Image

Hands-On Data Preprocessing in Python

By : Roy Jafari
5 (2)
Book Image

Hands-On Data Preprocessing in Python

5 (2)
By: Roy Jafari

Overview of this book

Hands-On Data Preprocessing is a primer on the best data cleaning and preprocessing techniques, written by an expert who’s developed college-level courses on data preprocessing and related subjects. With this book, you’ll be equipped with the optimum data preprocessing techniques from multiple perspectives, ensuring that you get the best possible insights from your data. You'll learn about different technical and analytical aspects of data preprocessing – data collection, data cleaning, data integration, data reduction, and data transformation – and get to grips with implementing them using the open source Python programming environment. The hands-on examples and easy-to-follow chapters will help you gain a comprehensive articulation of data preprocessing, its whys and hows, and identify opportunities where data analytics could lead to more effective decision making. As you progress through the chapters, you’ll also understand the role of data management systems and technologies for effective analytics and how to use APIs to pull data. By the end of this Python data preprocessing book, you'll be able to use Python to read, manipulate, and analyze data; perform data cleaning, integration, reduction, and transformation techniques, and handle outliers or missing values to effectively prepare data for analytic tools.
Table of Contents (24 chapters)
1
Part 1:Technical Needs
6
Part 2: Analytic Goals
11
Part 3: The Preprocessing
18
Part 4: Case Studies

Chapter 8: Clustering Analysis

Finally, you have made your way to the last chapter of the second part of this book. Clustering analysis is another useful and popular algorithmic pattern recognition tool. When performing classification or prediction, the algorithms find the patterns that help create a relationship between the independent attributes and the dependent attribute. However, clustering does not have a dependent attribute, so it does not have an agenda in pattern recognition. Clustering is an algorithmic pattern recognition tool with no prior goals. With clustering, you can investigate and extract the inherent patterns that exist in a dataset. Due to these differences, classification and prediction are called supervised learning, while clustering is known as unsupervised learning.

In this chapter, we will use examples to fundamentally understand clustering analysis. Then, we will learn about the most popular clustering algorithm: K-Means. We will also perform some K-Means...