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

Performing dimensionality data reduction

When we need to reduce the number of attributes (columns) as opposed to the number of data objects (rows), we have a case of dimensionality reduction. This is also known as dimension reduction. In this section, we will cover six methods: regression, decision tree, random forest, computational dimension reduction, functional data analysis (FDA), and principal component analysis (PCA).

Before we talk about each of them, we must note that there are two types of dimension reduction methods: supervised and unsupervised. Supervised dimension reduction methods aim to reduce the dimensions to help us predict or classify a dependent attribute. For instance, when we applied a decision tree algorithm to figure out which multi-variate patterns can predict customer churning, earlier in this chapter, we performed a supervised dimensionality reduction. The attributes that did not show up on the tree in Figure 13.2 are not important for predicting (classifying...