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 14: Data Transformation and Massaging

Congratulations, you've made your way to the last chapter of the third part of the book – The Preprocessing. In this part of the book, we have so far covered data cleaning, data integration, and data reduction. In this chapter, we will add the last piece to the arsenal of our data preprocessing tools – data transformation and massaging.

Data transformation normally is the last data preprocessing that is applied to our datasets. The dataset may need to be transformed to be ready for a prescribed analysis, or a specific transformation might help a certain analytics tool to perform better, or simply without a correct data transformation, the results of our analysis might be misleading.

In this chapter, we will cover when and where we need data transformation. Furthermore, we will cover the many techniques that are needed for every data preprocessing situation. In this chapter, we're going to cover the following...