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

Example 1 (challenges 3 and 4)

In this example, we have two sources of data. The first was retrieved from the local electricity provider that holds the electricity consumption (Electricity Data 2016_2017.csv), while the other was retrieved from the local weather station and includes temperature data (Temperature 2016.csv). We want to see if we can come up with a visualization that can answer if and how the amount of electricity consumption is affected by the weather.

First, we will use pd.read_csv() to read these CSV files into two pandas DataFrames called electric_df and temp_df. After reading the datasets into these DataFrames, we will look at them to understand their data structure. You will notice the following issues:

  • The data object definition of electric_df is the electric consumption in 15 minutes, but the data object definition of temp_df is the temperature every 1 hour. This shows that we have to face the aggregation mismatch challenge of data integration (Challenge...