Introducing EDA

Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) is the first step in the data science process. This term was coined by John Tukey in 1977, which was when he first wrote a book emphasizing the importance of Exploratory Data Analysis. It's required to understand the dataset better, check its features and shape, validate some hypothesis that you have in mind, and have a preliminary idea about the next step that you want to pursue in the following data science tasks.

In this section, you will work on the iris dataset, which was already used in the previous chapter. First, let's load the dataset:

In: iris_filename = './datasets-uci-iris.csv'
In: iris = pd.read_csv(iris_filename, header=None, names= ['sepal_length', 'sepal_width', 'petal_length', 'petal_width', 'target'])
iris.head()
Out:
   sepal_length  sepal_width  petal_length  petal_width       target
0           5.1          3.5           1.4          0.2  Iris-setosa
1           4.9          3.0           1.4          0.2  Iris-setosa
2...