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

Feature extraction

This type of data transformation is very similar to attribute construction. In both, we use our deep knowledge of the original data to drive transformed attributes that are more helpful for our analysis purposes.

In attribute construction, we either come up with a completely new attribute from scratch or combine some attributes to make a transformed attribute that is more useful; however, in feature extraction, we unpack and pick apart a single attribute and only keep what is useful for our analysis.

As always, we will go for the best way to learn what we just discussed – examples! We will see some illuminative examples in this arena.

Example – extract three attributes from one attribute

The following figure shows the transformation of the Email attribute into three binary attributes. Every email ends with @aWebAddress; by looking at the website address providing the email service, we have extracted the three Popular Free Platform, .edu...