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

Information versus pattern

Before finishing this chapter, which aims to arm you with all the necessary definitions and concepts needed for data preprocessing, we need to cover two more concepts: information and pattern.

Understanding everyday use of the word "information"

First, I need to bring your attention to two specific and yet very different functions of the term information. The first one is the everyday use of "information," which means "facts or details about somebody or something." This is how the Oxford English Dictionary defines information. However, while statisticians also employ this function of the word, sometimes the term information serves another purpose.

Statistical use of the word "information"

The term "information" could also refer to the value variation of one attribute across the population of a data object. In other words, information is used to refer to what an attribute adds to space knowledge...