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

Chapter 10

Why should we use a special stack of packages for data analysis?

Data analysis requires a fast and easy way to operate on multiple elements at once—a so-called vectorized approach. Python's scientific stack allows this by using numpya package for fast array operations.

Why are NumPy computations so fast compared to normal Python?

NumPy is drastically faster than vanilla Python on numerical operations. This is all thanks to a different data representation—NumPy arrays, in contrast to standard Python collections, require all the elements to be of the same data type. Because of that, an array can be passed to a CPU as one entity and computed more effectively.

What is the use case and benefit of using Pandas over NumPy?

NumPy only supports numeric arrays. Pandas, on the other hand, supports datetime, string, and categorical arrays. In addition...