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

Types of data values

For successful data preprocessing, you need to know the different types of data values from two different standpoints: analytics and programming. I will review the types of data values for both standpoints and then share with you their relationships and their connections.

Analytics standpoint

There are four major types of values from analytics standpoints: nominal, ordinal, interval-scaled, and ratio-scaled. In the literature, these four types of values are under four types of data attributes. The reason is that the types of values for each attribute must remain the same, therefore, you can extrapolate value types to attribute types.

Figure 3.5 – Types of data attributes

The preceding figure shows the tree of attribute types. The four mentioned types are in the middle. As you can see in the tree, Nominal and Ordinal attributes are called Categorical (or qualitative) attributes, whereas Interval-Scaled and Ratio-Scaled attributes...