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 7: Classification

As you learned how to go about predicting numerical values in the previous chapter, in this chapter, we will turn our attention to predicting categorical ones. Essentially, that is what classification is: predicting future categorical values. While prediction focuses on estimating what some numerical values will be in the future, classification predicts the occurrence or non-occurrence of events in the future. For instance, in this chapter, we will see how classification can predict whether an individual will default on their loan or not.

In this chapter, we will also discuss the procedural similarities and differences between prediction and classification and will cover two of the most famous classification algorithms: Decision Trees and K-Nearest Neighbors (KNN). While this chapter provides a fundamental understanding of classification algorithms and also shows how they are done using Python, this chapter cannot be looked at as a comprehensive reference...