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

Binary coding, ranking transformation, and discretization

In our analytics journey, there will be many instances in which we want to transform our data from numerical representation to categorical representation, or vice versa. To do these transformations, we will have to use one of three tools: binary coding, ranking transformation, and discretization.

As the following figure shows, to switch from Categories to Numbers, we either have to use Binary Coding or Ranking Transformation, and to switch from numbers to categories, we need to use Discretization:

Figure 14.3 – Direction of application for binary coding, ranking transformation, and discretization

One question that the preceding figure might bring to mind is, how do we know which one we choose when we want to move from categories to numbers: binary coding or ranking transformation? The answer is simple.

If the categories are nominal, we can only use binary coding; if they are ordinal, both...