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

Data cleaning level I – cleaning up the table

Data cleaning level I has the least deep data preprocessing steps. Most of the time, you can get away with not having your data cleaned at level I. However, having a dataset that is level I cleaned would be very rewarding as it would make the rest of the data cleaning process and data analytics much easier.

We will consider a level I dataset clean where the dataset has the following characteristics:

  • It is in a standard and preferred data structure.
  • It has codable and intuitive column titles.
  • Each row has a unique identifier.

The following three examples feature at least one or a combination of the preceding characteristics for ease of learning.

Example 1 – unwise data collection

From time to time, you might come across sources of data that are not collected and recorded in the best possible way. These situations occur when the data collection process has been done by someone or a group of people...