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

Chapter 6: Prediction

Being able to predict the future using data is becoming increasingly possible. Not only that; soon, being able to perform successful predictive modeling will not be a competitive advantage anymore—it will be a necessity to survive. To improve the effectiveness of predictive modeling, many focus on the algorithms that are used for prediction; however, there are many meaningful steps you can take to improve the success of prediction by performing more effective data preprocessing. That is the end goal in this book: learning how to preprocess data more effectively. However, in this chapter, we are going to take a very important step toward that goal. In this chapter, we are going to learn the fundamentals of predictive modeling. When we learn the concepts and the techniques of data preprocessing, we will rely on these fundamentals to make better data preprocessing decisions.

While many different algorithms can be applied for predictive modeling, the fundamental...