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

Predictive models

Using data to predict the future is exciting and doable using data analytics. In the realm of data analytics, there are two types of future predictions, outlined as follows:

  • Predict a numerical value—for example, predict next year's price of Amazon's stock market.
  • Predict a label or a class—for example, predict whether a customer is likely to stop purchasing your services and switch to your competition.

By and large, when we use the term prediction, we mean predicting a numerical value. To predict a class or a label, the term that is used is classification. In this chapter, we will focus on the prediction goal of data analytics, and the next chapter will cover classification.

The prediction of future numerical values also falls into two major overarching types: forecasting and regression analysis. We will briefly explain forecasting, before turning our attention to regression analysis.

Forecasting

In data analytics...