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

The most universal data structure – a table

Regardless of the complexity and high Vs of your data, and even regardless of you wanting to do data visualization or machine learning, successful data preprocessing always leads to one table. At the end of successful data preprocessing, we want to create a table that is ready to be mined, analyzed, or visualized. We call this table a dataset. The following figure shows you a table with its structural elements:

Figure 3.4 – Table data structure

As shown in the figure, for data analytics and machine learning, we use specific keywords to talk about the structure of a table: data objects and data attributes.

Data objects

I'm sure you have seen and successfully made sense of so many tables and created so many of them as well. I bet many of you would have never paid attention to the conceptual foundations of the table that allows you to create them and make sense of them. The conceptual foundation...