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

Connecting to, and pulling data from, databases

For data analytics and data preprocessing, we need to have the skillset to connect to databases and pull the data we want from them. There are a few ways you can go about this. In this section, we will cover these ways, share their advantages and disadvantages, and, with the help of examples, we will see how this is done.

We will cover five methods of connecting to a database: direct connection, web page connection, API connection, request connection, and publicly shared.

Direct connection

When you are allowed access to a database directly, it means you can pull any data you want from the database. This is a great method of pulling data from databases, but there are two major disadvantages. First, you are rarely given direct access to databases unless you are completely trusted by the owner of the database. Second, you need to have the skillset to interact with a database to pull the data from it. The script you need to know...