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

What are data fusion and data integration?

In most cases, data fusion and data integration are terms that are used interchangeably, but there are conceptual and technical distinctions between them. We will get to those shortly. Let's start with what both have in common and what they mean. Whenever the data we need for our analytic goals are from different sources, before we can perform the data analytics, we need to integrate the data sources into one dataset that we need for our analytic goals. The following diagram summarizes this integration visually:

Figure 12.1 – Data integration from different sources

In the real world, data integration is much more difficult than what's shown in the preceding figure. There are many challenges that you need to overcome before integration is possible. These challenges could be due to organizational privacy and security challenges that restrict our data accessibility. But even assuming that these challenges...