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

Writing the file

Finally, we have all the data we wanted, in a more-or-less good condition. Let's store it in CSV format. We can always use other formats instead. For example, the pickle format, by definition, preserves all the data types and properties of the dataframe (we won't need to convert dates from strings again), but can't be read manually (it also has a number of security risks). CSV, on the other hand, can be opened manually or with something like Excel, edited, and then stored again if you observed that there are factual errors in the data or something that is easier to correct manually.

In the following code block, we export our CSV file into a dataframe just to specify a relative path to the file we want it to be. The index=None argument is optional—this ensures that the index (a generic range of numbers in our case) won't be written:

new_dataset...