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

Smoothing, aggregation, and binning

In our discussion about noise in data in Chapter 11, Data Cleaning Level III – Missing Values, Outliers, and Errors, we learned that there are two types of errors – systematic errors and unavoidable noise. In Chapter 11, Data Cleaning Level III – Missing Values, Outliers, and Errors, we discussed how we deal with systematic errors, and now here we will discuss noise. This is not covered under data cleaning, because noise is an unavoidable part of any data collection, so it cannot be discussed as data cleaning. However, here we will discuss it under data transformation, as we may be able to take measures to best handle it. The three methods that can help deal with noise are smoothing, aggregation, and binning.

It might seem surprising that these methods are only applied to time-series data to deal with noise. However, there is a distinct and definitive reason for it. You see, it is only in time-series data, or any data that...