Book Image

Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

By : Philipp Kats, David Katz
Book Image

Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

By: Philipp Kats, David Katz

Overview of this book

Python is the most widely used programming language for building data science applications. Complete with step-by-step instructions, this book contains easy-to-follow tutorials to help you learn Python and develop real-world data science projects. The “secret sauce” of the book is its curated list of topics and solutions, put together using a range of real-world projects, covering initial data collection, data analysis, and production. This Python book starts by taking you through the basics of programming, right from variables and data types to classes and functions. You’ll learn how to write idiomatic code and test and debug it, and discover how you can create packages or use the range of built-in ones. You’ll also be introduced to the extensive ecosystem of Python data science packages, including NumPy, Pandas, scikit-learn, Altair, and Datashader. Furthermore, you’ll be able to perform data analysis, train models, and interpret and communicate the results. Finally, you’ll get to grips with structuring and scheduling scripts using Luigi and sharing your machine learning models with the world as a microservice. By the end of the book, you’ll have learned not only how to implement Python in data science projects, but also how to maintain and design them to meet high programming standards.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Getting Started with Python
11
Section 2: Hands-On with Data
17
Section 3: Moving to Production

Working with real data

Let's now try using pandas on real data. In Chapter 7, Scraping Data from the Web with Beautiful Soup 4, we collected a huge dataset of WWII battles and operations—including casualties, armies, dates, and locations. We never explored what is inside the dataset, though, and usually, this kind of data requires intensive processing. Now, let's see what we'll be able to do with this data.

As you may recall, we stored the dataset as a nested .json file. pandas can read from JSON files of different structures, but it won't understand nested data points. At this point, the task for us is straightforward (you may think of writing a recursive function, for example), so we won't discuss this much. If you want, you can check the 0_json_to_table.ipynb notebook in this chapter's folder on GitHub at the following link: https://github...