Fr

With this book you can get started with Python data analysis
in a practical and example-driven way.
The book starts by introducing the principles of data analysis
and supported Python libraries, along with the basics of
NumPy for numerical data processing. Next, it provides
an overview of Pandas, a powerful library to solve data
processing problems.
Moving on, the book takes you through a brief overview of
the Matplotlib API and some common plotting functions for
visualization. Next, it will teach you how to manipulate time
series data and how to persist data structures to files or
databases. It also shows how you can reshape data to be
able to ask interesting questions about it.
Finally, the book gives a brief introduction to scikit-learn,
a popular machine learning library; how do you represent
data, what are supervised and unsupervised algorithm,
and how can we measure prediction performance, all such
questions are answered through examples.

If you are a Python developer who wants to get started with

data analysis and you need a quick introductory guide to
Python data analysis libraries, then this book is for you.

Understand the importance of data analysis

and become familiar with its processing steps
Get acquainted with Numpy to use it
with arrays and array-oriented computing
in data analysis

C o m m u n i t y

Interact with different kind of database

systems, such as file, disk format, Mongo,
and Redis
Apply the Python supported package to data
analysis applications, by using examples
Explore predictive analytics and machine
learning algorithms using Scikit-learn,
a Python library

Martin Czygan

P U B L I S H I N G

pl

Process and analyze data using the time

series capabilities of pandas

$ 34.99 US
22.99 UK

community experience distilled

Sa
m

Create effective visualizations for presenting

your data using Matplotlib

Phuong Vo.T.H

Who this book is written for

What you will learn from this book

Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

Getting Started with

Python Data Analysis

ee

D i s t i l l e d

Getting Started with

Python Data Analysis
Learn to use powerful Python libraries for effective data
processing and analysis

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Martin Czygan

In this package, you will find:

The authors biography

A preview chapter from the book, Chapter 1 'Introducing Data Analysis
and Libraries'
A synopsis of the books content
More information on Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

About the Authors

Phuong Vo.T.H has a MSc degree in computer science, which is related to

machine learning. After graduation, she continued to work in some companies

as a data scientist. She has experience in analyzing users' behavior and building
recommendation systems based on users' web histories. She loves to read machine
learning and mathematics algorithm books, as well as data analysis articles.

Martin Czygan studied German literature and computer science in Leipzig,

Germany. He has been working as a software engineer for more than 10 years. For
the past eight years, he has been diving into Python, and is still enjoying it. In recent
years, he has been helping clients to build data processing pipelines and search
and analytics systems. His consultancy can be found at http://www.xvfz.net.

Preface
The world generates data at an increasing pace. Consumers, sensors, or scientific
experiments emit data points every day. In finance, business, administration and the
natural or social sciences, working with data can make up a significant part of the job.
Being able to efficiently work with small or large datasets has become a valuable skill.
There are a variety of applications to work with data, from spreadsheet applications,
which are widely deployed and used, to more specialized statistical packages for
experienced users, which often support domain-specific extensions for experts.
Python started as a general purpose language. It has been used in industry for a
long time, but it has been popular among researchers as well. Around ten years
ago, in 2006, the first version of NumPy was released, which made Python a first
class language for numerical computing and laid the foundation for a prospering
development, which led to what we today call the PyData ecosystem: A growing
set of high-performance libraries to be used in the sciences, finance, business or
anywhere else you want to work efficiently with datasets.
In contrast to more specialized applications and environments, Python is not
only about data analysis. The list of industrial-strength libraries for many general
computing tasks is long, which makes working with data in Python even more
compelling. Whether your data lives inside SQL or NoSQL databases or is out there
on the Web and must be crawled or scraped first, the Python community has already
developed packages for many of those tasks.

Preface

And the outlook seems bright. Working with bigger datasets is getting simpler and
sharing research findings and creating interactive programming notebooks has never
been easier. It is the perfect moment to learn about data analysis in Python. This
book lets you get started with a few core libraries of the PyData ecosystem: Numpy,
Pandas, and matplotlib. In addition, two NoSQL databases are introduced. The final
chapter will take a quick tour through one of the most popular machine learning
libraries in Python.
We hope you find Python a valuable tool for your everyday data work and that we
can give you enough material to get productive in the data analysis space quickly.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introducing Data Analysis and Libraries, describes the typical steps involved
in a data analysis task. In addition, a couple of existing data analysis software
packages are described.
Chapter 2, NumPy Arrays and Vectorized Computation, dives right into the core of
the PyData ecosystem by introducing the NumPy package for high-performance
computing. The basic data structure is a typed multidimensional array which
supports various functions, among them typical linear algebra tasks. The data
structure and functions are explained along with examples.
Chapter 3, Data Analysis with Pandas, introduces a prominent and popular data
analysis library for Python called Pandas. It is built on NumPy, but makes a lot
of real-world tasks simpler. Pandas comes with its own core data structures,
which are explained in detail.
Chapter 4, Data Visualizaiton, focuses on another important aspect of data analysis:
the understanding of data through graphical representations. The Matplotlib
library is introduced in this chapter. It is one of the most popular 2D plotting
libraries for Python and it is well integrated with Pandas as well.
Chapter 5, Time Series, shows how to work with time-oriented data in Pandas. Date
and time handling can quickly become a difficult, error-prone task when implemented
from scratch. We show how Pandas can be of great help there, by looking in detail at
some of the functions for date parsing and date sequence generation.
Chapter 6, Interacting with Databases, deals with some typical scenarios. Your data
does not live in vacuum, and it might not always be available as CSV files either.
MongoDB is a NoSQL database and Redis is a data structure server, although many
people think of it as a key value store first. Both storage systems are introduced to
help you interact with data from real-world systems.

Preface

Chapter 7, Data Analysis Application Examples, applies many of the things covered
in the previous chapters to deepen your understanding of typical data analysis
workflows. How do you clean, inspect, reshape, merge, or group data these are the
concerns in this chapter. The library of choice in the chapter will be Pandas again.
Chapter 8, Machine Learning Models with scikit-learn, would like to make you familiar
with a popular machine learning package for Python. While it supports dozens of
models, we only look at four models, two supervised and two unsupervised. Even if
this is not mentioned explicitly, this chapter brings together a lot of the existing tools.
Pandas is often used for machine learning data preparation and matplotlib is used
to create plots to facilitate understanding.

Introducing Data Analysis

and Libraries
Data is raw information that can exist in any form, usable or not. We can easily get
data everywhere in our lives; for example, the price of gold on the day of writing
was $ 1.158 per ounce. This does not have any meaning, except describing the price
of gold. This also shows that data is useful based on context.
With the relational data connection, information appears and allows us to expand
our knowledge beyond the range of our senses. When we possess gold price data
gathered over time, one piece of information we might have is that the price has
continuously risen from $1.152 to $1.158 over three days. This could be used by
someone who tracks gold prices.
Knowledge helps people to create value in their lives and work. This value is
based on information that is organized, synthesized, or summarized to enhance
comprehension, awareness, or understanding. It represents a state or potential for
action and decisions. When the price of gold continuously increases for three days, it
will likely decrease on the next day; this is useful knowledge.

[1]

Introducing Data Analysis and Libraries

The following figure illustrates the steps from data to knowledge; we call this
process, the data analysis process and we will introduce it in the next section:

Decision making
Synthesising

Knowledge

Gold price will slightly

decrease on next day

Analysing
Summarizing

Gold price has risen

for three days

Information

organizing
Data

Gold price today is 1158$

Collecting

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

Data analysis and process

An overview of libraries in data analysis using different programming

languages

Common Python data analysis libraries

Data analysis and processing

Data is getting bigger and more diverse every day. Therefore, analyzing and
processing data to advance human knowledge or to create value is a big challenge.
To tackle these challenges, you will need domain knowledge and a variety of skills,
drawing from areas such as computer science, artificial intelligence (AI) and
machine learning (ML), statistics and mathematics, and knowledge domain, as
shown in the following figure:

[2]

Chapter 1

Artificial
Intelligent &
Machine
Learning

Pr

s
hm
rit
go ....

Al

og
ra
... mm
.
in
g

Computer
Science

Data Analysis

se

rti
pe
ex ..
..

M
a
... th
.

ta

Da

Knowledge
Domain

Statistics &
Mathematics

Let's go through data analysis and its domain knowledge:

Computer science: We need this knowledge to provide abstractions for

efficient data processing. Basic Python programming experience is required
to follow the next chapters. We will introduce Python libraries used in data
analysis.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning: If computer science knowledge

helps us to program data analysis tools, artificial intelligence and machine
learning help us to model the data and learn from it in order to build smart
products.

Statistics and mathematics: We cannot extract useful information from raw

data if we do not use statistical techniques or mathematical functions.

Knowledge domain: Besides technology and general techniques, it is

important to have an insight into the specific domain. What do the data fields
mean? What data do we need to collect? Based on the expertise, we explore
and analyze raw data by applying the above techniques, step by step.

[3]

Introducing Data Analysis and Libraries

Data analysis is a process composed of the following steps:

Data requirements: We have to define what kind of data will be collected

based on the requirements or problem analysis. For example, if we want to
detect a user's behavior while reading news on the internet, we should be
aware of visited article links, dates and times, article categories, and the time
the user spends on different pages.

Data collection: Data can be collected from a variety of sources: mobile,

personal computer, camera, or recording devices. It may also be obtained in
different ways: communication, events, and interactions between person and
person, person and device, or device and device. Data appears whenever and
wherever in the world. The problem is how we can find and gather it to solve
our problem? This is the mission of this step.

Data processing: Data that is initially obtained must be processed or

organized for analysis. This process is performance-sensitive. How fast can
we create, insert, update, or query data? When building a real product that
has to process big data, we should consider this step carefully. What kind of
database should we use to store data? What kind of data structure, such as
analysis, statistics, or visualization, is suitable for our purposes?

Data cleaning: After being processed and organized, the data may still
contain duplicates or errors. Therefore, we need a cleaning step to reduce
those situations and increase the quality of the results in the following
steps. Common tasks include record matching, deduplication, and column
segmentation. Depending on the type of data, we can apply several types of
data cleaning. For example, a user's history of visits to a news website might
contain a lot of duplicate rows, because the user might have refreshed certain
pages many times. For our specific issue, these rows might not carry any
meaning when we explore the user's behavior so we should remove them
before saving it to our database. Another situation we may encounter is click
fraud on newssomeone just wants to improve their website ranking or
sabotage awebsite. In this case, the data will not help us to explore a user's
behavior. We can use thresholds to check whether a visit page event comes
from a real person or from malicious software.

Exploratory data analysis: Now, we can start to analyze data through a

variety of techniques referred to as exploratory data analysis. We may detect
additional problems in data cleaning or discover requests for further data.
Therefore, these steps may be iterative and repeated throughout the whole
data analysis process. Data visualization techniques are also used to examine
the data in graphs or charts. Visualization often facilitates understanding of
data sets, especially if they are large or high-dimensional.

[4]

Chapter 1

Modelling and algorithms: A lot of mathematical formulas and algorithms

may be applied to detect or predict useful knowledge from the raw data. For
example, we can use similarity measures to cluster users who have exhibited
similar news-reading behavior and recommend articles of interest to them
next time. Alternatively, we can detect users' genders based on their news
reading behavior by applying classification models such as the Support
Vector Machine (SVM) or linear regression. Depending on the problem, we
may use different algorithms to get an acceptable result. It can take a lot of
time to evaluate the accuracy of the algorithms and choose the best one to
implement for a certain product.

Data product: The goal of this step is to build data products that receive data
input and generate output according to the problem requirements. We will
apply computer science knowledge to implement our selected algorithms as
well as manage the data storage.

An overview of the libraries in data

analysis
There are numerous data analysis libraries that help us to process and analyze data.
They use different programming languages, and have different advantages and
disadvantages of solving various data analysis problems. Now, we will introduce
some common libraries that may be useful for you. They should give you an
overview of the libraries in the field. However, the rest of this book focuses on
Python-based libraries.
Some of the libraries that use the Java language for data analysis are as follows:

Weka: This is the library that I became familiar with the first time I learned
about data analysis. It has a graphical user interface that allows you to run
experiments on a small dataset. This is great if you want to get a feel for what
is possible in the data processing space. However, if you build a complex
product, I think it is not the best choice, because of its performance, sketchy
API design, non-optimal algorithms, and little documentation (http://www.
cs.waikato.ac.nz/ml/weka/).

[5]

Introducing Data Analysis and Libraries

Mallet: This is another Java library that is used for statistical natural
language processing, document classification, clustering, topic modeling,
information extraction, and other machine-learning applications on text.
There is an add-on package for Mallet, called GRMM, that contains support
for inference in general, graphical models, and training of Conditional
random fields (CRF) with arbitrary graphical structures. In my experience,
the library performance and the algorithms are better than Weka. However,
its only focus is on text-processing problems. The reference page is at
http://mallet.cs.umass.edu/.

Mahout: This is Apache's machine-learning framework built on top of

Hadoop; its goal is to build a scalable machine-learning library. It looks
promising, but comes with all the baggage and overheads of Hadoop.
The homepage is at http://mahout.apache.org/.

Spark: This is a relatively new Apache project, supposedly up to a hundred

times faster than Hadoop. It is also a scalable library that consists of common
machine-learning algorithms and utilities. Development can be done in
Python as well as in any JVM language. The reference page is at
https://spark.apache.org/docs/1.5.0/mllib-guide.html.

Here are a few libraries that are implemented in C++:

Vowpal Wabbit: This library is a fast, out-of-core learning system sponsored

by Microsoft Research and, previously, Yahoo! Research. It has been
used to learn a tera-feature (1012) dataset on 1,000 nodes in one hour.
More information can be found in the publication at http://arxiv.org/
abs/1110.4198.

MultiBoost: This package is a multiclass, multi label, and multitask

classification boosting software implemented in C++. If you use
this software, you should refer to the paper published in 2012 in the
JournalMachine Learning Research, MultiBoost: A Multi-purpose Boosting
Package, D.Benbouzid, R. Busa-Fekete, N. Casagrande, F.-D. Collin, and B. Kgl.

MLpack: This is also a C++ machine-learning library, developed by the

Fundamental Algorithmic and Statistical Tools Laboratory (FASTLab)
at Georgia Tech. It focusses on scalability, speed, and ease-of-use, and was
presented at the BigLearning workshop of NIPS 2011. Its homepage is at
http://www.mlpack.org/about.html.

Caffe: The last C++ library we want to mention is Caffe. This is a deep
learning framework made with expression, speed, and modularity in mind.
It is developed by the Berkeley Vision and Learning Center (BVLC) and
community contributors. You can find more information about it at
http://caffe.berkeleyvision.org/.
[6]

Chapter 1

Other libraries for data processing and analysis are as follows:

Statsmodels: This is a great Python library for statistical modeling and is

mainly used for predictive and exploratory analysis.

Modular toolkit for data processing (MDP): This is a collection of

supervised and unsupervised learning algorithms and other data processing
units that can be combined into data processing sequences and more complex
feed-forward network architectures (http://mdp-toolkit.sourceforge.
net/index.html).

Orange: This is an open source data visualization and analysis for novices
and experts. It is packed with features for data analysis and has add-ons
for bioinformatics and text mining. It contains an implementation of
self-organizing maps, which sets it apart from the other projects as well
(http://orange.biolab.si/).

Mirador: This is a tool for the visual exploration of complex datasets,

supporting Mac and Windows. It enables users to discover correlation patterns
and derive new hypotheses from data (http://orange.biolab.si/).

RapidMiner: This is another GUI-based tool for data mining, machine

learning, and predictive analysis (https://rapidminer.com/).

Theano: This bridges the gap between Python and lower-level languages.
Theano gives very significant performance gains, particularly for large
matrix operations, and is, therefore, a good choice for deep learning models.
However, it is not easy to debug because of the additional compilation layer.

Natural language processing toolkit (NLTK): This is written in Python with

very unique and salient features.

Here, I could not list all libraries for data analysis. However, I think the above
libraries are enough to take a lot of your time to learn and build data analysis
applications. I hope you will enjoy them after reading this book.

Python libraries in data analysis

Python is a multi-platform, general-purpose programming language that can run
on Windows, Linux/Unix, and Mac OS X, and has been ported to Java and .NET
virtual machines as well. It has a powerful standard library. In addition, it has
many libraries for data analysis: Pylearn2, Hebel, Pybrain, Pattern, MontePython,
and MILK. In this book, we will cover some common Python data analysis libraries
such as Numpy, Pandas, Matplotlib, PyMongo, and scikit-learn. Now, to help you
get started, I will briefly present an overview of each library for those who are less
familiar with the scientific Python stack.
[7]

Introducing Data Analysis and Libraries

NumPy
One of the fundamental packages used for scientific computing in Python is Numpy.
Among other things, it contains the following:

A powerful N-dimensional array object

Sophisticated (broadcasting) functions for performing array computations

Tools for integrating C/C++ and Fortran code

Useful linear algebra operations, Fourier transformations, and random

number capabilities

Besides this, it can also be used as an efficient multidimensional container of

generic data. Arbitrary data types can be defined and integrated with a wide
variety of databases.

Pandas
Pandas is a Python package that supports rich data structures and functions for
analyzing data, and is developed by the PyData Development Team. It is focused on
the improvement of Python's data libraries. Pandas consists of the following things:

A set of labeled array data structures; the primary of which are Series,
DataFrame, and Panel

Index objects enabling both simple axis indexing and multilevel/hierarchical

axis indexing

An intergraded group by engine for aggregating and transforming datasets

Date range generation and custom date offsets

Input/output tools that load and save data from flat files or PyTables/HDF5
format

Optimal memory versions of the standard data structures

Moving window statistics and static and moving window linear/panel

regression

Due to these features, Pandas is an ideal tool for systems that need complex
data structures or high-performance time series functions such as financial data
analysis applications.

[8]

Chapter 1

Matplotlib
Matplotlib is the single most used Python package for 2D-graphics. It provides
both a very quick way to visualize data from Python and publication-quality
figures in many formats: line plots, contour plots, scatter plots, and Basemap plots.
It comes with a set of default settings, but allows customization of all kinds of
properties. However, we can easily create our chart with the defaults of almost
every property in Matplotlib.

PyMongo
MongoDB is a type of NoSQL database. It is highly scalable, robust, and perfect to
work with JavaScript-based web applications, because we can store data as JSON
documents and use flexible schemas.
PyMongo is a Python distribution containing tools for working with MongoDB.
Many tools have also been written for working with PyMongo to add more features
such as MongoKit, Humongolus, MongoAlchemy, and Ming.

The scikit-learn library

The scikit-learn is an open source machine-learning library using the Python
programming language. It supports various machine learning models, such as
classification, regression, and clustering algorithms, interoperated with the Python
numerical and scientific libraries NumPy and SciPy. The latest scikit-learn version is
0.16.1, published in April 2015.

Summary
In this chapter, we presented three main points. Firstly, we figured out the
relationship between raw data, information and knowledge. Due to its contribution
to our lives, we continued to discuss an overview of data analysis and processing
steps in the second section. Finally, we introduced a few common supported libraries
that are useful for practical data analysis applications. Among those, in the next
chapters, we will focus on Python libraries in data analysis.

[9]

Introducing Data Analysis and Libraries

Practice exercise
The following table describes users' rankings on Snow White movies:
UserID

Sex

Location

Ranking

Male

Philips

Male

VN

Male

Canada

Male

Canada

Female

VN

Female

NY

Exercise 1: What information can we find in this table? What kind of knowledge can
we derive from it?
Exercise 2: Based on the data analysis process in this chapter, try to define the data
requirements and analysis steps needed to predict whether user B likes Maleficent
movies or not.

[ 10 ]

Get more information Getting Started with Python Data Analysis

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