Book Image

Applying Math with Python

By : Sam Morley
Book Image

Applying Math with Python

By: Sam Morley

Overview of this book

Python, one of the world's most popular programming languages, has a number of powerful packages to help you tackle complex mathematical problems in a simple and efficient way. These core capabilities help programmers pave the way for building exciting applications in various domains, such as machine learning and data science, using knowledge in the computational mathematics domain. The book teaches you how to solve problems faced in a wide variety of mathematical fields, including calculus, probability, statistics and data science, graph theory, optimization, and geometry. You'll start by developing core skills and learning about packages covered in Python’s scientific stack, including NumPy, SciPy, and Matplotlib. As you advance, you'll get to grips with more advanced topics of calculus, probability, and networks (graph theory). After you gain a solid understanding of these topics, you'll discover Python's applications in data science and statistics, forecasting, geometry, and optimization. The final chapters will take you through a collection of miscellaneous problems, including working with specific data formats and accelerating code. By the end of this book, you'll have an arsenal of practical coding solutions that can be used and modified to solve a wide range of practical problems in computational mathematics and data science.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)

Loading and storing data from a DataFrame

It is fairly unusual to create a DataFrame object from the raw data in a Python session. In practice, the data will often come from an external source, such as an existing spreadsheet or CSV file, database, or API endpoint. For this reason, pandas provides numerous utilities for loading and storing data to file. Out of the box, pandas supports loading and storing data from CSV, Excel (xls or xlsx), JSON, SQL, Parquet, and Google BigQuery. This makes it very easy to import your data into pandas and then manipulate and analyze this data using Python.

In this recipe, we will see how to load and store data into a CSV file. The instructions will be similar for loading and storing data to other file formats.

Getting ready

For this recipe, we will need to import the pandas package under the pdalias and the NumPy library as np, and we create a default random number generator from NumPy using the following commands:

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