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

Analyzing the data

In this part, we will do two types of unsupervised data analysis. We first use principal component analysis (PCA) to create a high-level visualization of the whole data. Next, after having been informed how many clusters are possibly among the data objects, we will use K-Means to form the clusters and study them. Let's start with PCA.

Using PCA to visualize the dataset

As we already know, PCA can transform the dataset, so most of the information is presented in the first few principal components (PCs). Our investigation showed that the majority of relationships between the attributes, including county_df, is linear, which is allowing us to be able to use PCA; however, we won't forget about the few non-linear relationships as we move ahead with PCA, and we will not rely too much on the results of the PCA.

The following screenshot shows a three-dimensional (3D) scatterplot of PC1, PC2, and PC3. PC1 and PC2 are visualized using the x and y axes, whereas...