Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python

By : Stephen Klosterman
Book Image

Data Science Projects with Python

By: Stephen Klosterman

Overview of this book

Data Science Projects with Python is designed to give you practical guidance on industry-standard data analysis and machine learning tools, by applying them to realistic data problems. You will learn how to use pandas and Matplotlib to critically examine datasets with summary statistics and graphs, and extract the insights you seek to derive. You will build your knowledge as you prepare data using the scikit-learn package and feed it to machine learning algorithms such as regularized logistic regression and random forest. You’ll discover how to tune algorithms to provide the most accurate predictions on new and unseen data. As you progress, you’ll gain insights into the working and output of these algorithms, building your understanding of both the predictive capabilities of the models and why they make these predictions. By then end of this book, you will have the necessary skills to confidently use machine learning algorithms to perform detailed data analysis and extract meaningful insights from unstructured data.
Table of Contents (9 chapters)
Data Science Projects with Python
Preface

Dealing with Missing Data: Imputation Strategies


Recall that in Chapter 1, Data Exploration and Cleaning, we encountered a sizable proportion of samples in the dataset (3,021/29,685 = 10.2%) where the value of the PAY_1 feature was missing. This is a problem that needs to be dealt with, because many machine learning algorithms, including the implementations of logistic regression and random forest in scikit-learn, cannot accept input for model training or testing that includes missing values.

Our solution to this problem was to simply discard all the samples that had missing values for PAY_1. However, after discussing this issue with our client, we learned that the missing values of PAY_1 were due to a reporting issue that they are working on correcting. In the near-term, if there is a method available that can enable the inclusion of the accounts with missing PAY_1 information in the model prediction process, it would be preferable. So, we need to consider how we could make predictions for...