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Practical Data Analysis
Practical Data Analysis

Practical Data Analysis: Pandas, MongoDB, Apache Spark, and more , Second Edition

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Practical Data Analysis

Chapter 2. Preprocessing Data

Building real world data analytic solutions requires accurate data. In this chapter, we discuss how to collect, clean, normalize, and transform raw data into a standard format such as Comma-Separated Values (CSV) format or JavaScript Object Notation (JSON), using a tool to process a messy data called OpenRefine.

In this chapter, we will cover the following:

  • Data sources
  • Data scrubbing
  • Data reduction methods
  • Data formats
  • Getting started with OpenRefine

Data sources

Data source is a term for all the technology related to the extraction and storage of data. A data source can be anything from a simple text file to a big database. The raw data can come from observation logs, sensors, transactions, or user behavior.

A dataset is a collection of data, usually presented in a tabular form. Each column represents a particular attribute, and each row corresponds to a given member of the data, as is showed in the following screenshot.

Data sources

In this section, we will take a look at the most common forms for data sources and datasets.

Tip

The data in the preceding screenshot is from the classical Weather dataset of the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository:

http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

A dataset represents a logical implementation of a data source; the common features of a dataset:

  • Dataset characteristics (multivariate and univariate)
  • Number of instances
  • Area (life, business, and many more)
  • Attribute characteristics (real, categorical, and nominal)
  • Number of...

Data scrubbing

Scrubbing data, also called data cleansing, is the process of correcting or removing data in a dataset that is incorrect, inaccurate, incomplete, improperly formatted, or duplicated.

The result of the data analysis process not only depends on the algorithms, it depends on the quality of the data. That's why the next step after obtaining the data, is data scrubbing. In order to avoid dirty data, our dataset should possess the following characteristics:

  • Correct
  • Completeness
  • Accuracy
  • Consistency
  • Uniformity

Dirty data can be detected by applying some simple statistical data validation and also by parsing the texts or deleting duplicate values. Missing or sparse data can lead you to highly misleading results.

Statistical methods

In this method, we need some context about the problem (knowledge domain) to find values that are unexpected and thus erroneous, even if the data type matches but the values are out of the range. This can be resolved by setting the values to an average or...

Data sources


Data source is a term for all the technology related to the extraction and storage of data. A data source can be anything from a simple text file to a big database. The raw data can come from observation logs, sensors, transactions, or user behavior.

A dataset is a collection of data, usually presented in a tabular form. Each column represents a particular attribute, and each row corresponds to a given member of the data, as is showed in the following screenshot.

In this section, we will take a look at the most common forms for data sources and datasets.

Tip

The data in the preceding screenshot is from the classical Weather dataset of the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository: http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/

A dataset represents a logical implementation of a data source; the common features of a dataset:

  • Dataset characteristics (multivariate and univariate)

  • Number of instances

  • Area (life, business, and many more)

  • Attribute characteristics (real, categorical, and nominal)

  • Number of...

Data scrubbing


Scrubbing data, also called data cleansing, is the process of correcting or removing data in a dataset that is incorrect, inaccurate, incomplete, improperly formatted, or duplicated.

The result of the data analysis process not only depends on the algorithms, it depends on the quality of the data. That's why the next step after obtaining the data, is data scrubbing. In order to avoid dirty data, our dataset should possess the following characteristics:

  • Correct

  • Completeness

  • Accuracy

  • Consistency

  • Uniformity

Dirty data can be detected by applying some simple statistical data validation and also by parsing the texts or deleting duplicate values. Missing or sparse data can lead you to highly misleading results.

Statistical methods

In this method, we need some context about the problem (knowledge domain) to find values that are unexpected and thus erroneous, even if the data type matches but the values are out of the range. This can be resolved by setting the values to an average or mean value...

Data formats


When we are working with data for human consumption, the easiest way to store it is in text files. In this section, we will present parsing examples of the most common formats such as CSV, JSON, and XML. These examples will be very helpful in the following chapters.

Tip

The dataset used for these examples is a list of Pokemon by National Pokedex number, obtained from: http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/All the scripts and dataset files can be found in the author's GitHub repository: https://github.com/hmcuesta/PDA_Book/tree/master/Chapter3

CSV is a very simple and common open format for table-like data, which can be exported and imported by most of the data analysis tools. CSV is a plain text format; this means that the file is a sequence of characters, with no data that has to be interpreted instead, such as binary numbers.

There are many ways to parse a CSV file from Python, and here we will discuss two:

The first eight records of the CSV file (pokemon.csv) look like this:

 id,...

Data reduction methods


Many data scientists use large data size in volume for analysis, which takes a long time, though it is very difficult to analyze the data sometimes. In data analytics applications, if you use a large amount of data, it may produce redundant results. In order to overcome such difficulties, we can use data reduction methods.

Data reduction is the transformation of numerical or alphabetical digital information derived empirically or experimentally into a corrected, ordered, and simplified form. Reduced data size is very small in volume and comparatively original, hence, the storage efficiency will increase and at the same time we can minimize the data handling costs and will minimize the analysis time also.

We can use several types of data reduction methods, which are listed as follows:

  • Filtering and sampling

  • Binned algorithm

  • Dimensionality reduction

Filtering and sampling

In data reduction methods, filtering plays an important role. Filtering explains the process of detecting...

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Key benefits

  • Learn to use various data analysis tools and algorithms to classify, cluster, visualize, simulate, and forecast your data
  • Apply Machine Learning algorithms to different kinds of data such as social networks, time series, and images
  • A hands-on guide to understanding the nature of data and how to turn it into insight

Description

Beyond buzzwords like Big Data or Data Science, there are a great opportunities to innovate in many businesses using data analysis to get data-driven products. Data analysis involves asking many questions about data in order to discover insights and generate value for a product or a service. This book explains the basic data algorithms without the theoretical jargon, and you’ll get hands-on turning data into insights using machine learning techniques. We will perform data-driven innovation processing for several types of data such as text, Images, social network graphs, documents, and time series, showing you how to implement large data processing with MongoDB and Apache Spark.

Who is this book for?

This book is for developers who want to implement data analysis and data-driven algorithms in a practical way. It is also suitable for those without a background in data analysis or data processing. Basic knowledge of Python programming, statistics, and linear algebra is assumed.

What you will learn

  • Acquire, format, and visualize your data
  • Build an image-similarity search engine
  • Generate meaningful visualizations anyone can understand
  • Get started with analyzing social network graphs
  • Find out how to implement sentiment text analysis
  • Install data analysis tools such as Pandas, MongoDB, and Apache Spark
  • Get to grips with Apache Spark
  • Implement machine learning algorithms such as classification or forecasting
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Length: 338 pages
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Language : English
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Table of Contents

15 Chapters
1. Getting Started Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
2. Preprocessing Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
3. Getting to Grips with Visualization Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
4. Text Classification Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
5. Similarity-Based Image Retrieval Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
6. Simulation of Stock Prices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
7. Predicting Gold Prices Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
8. Working with Support Vector Machines Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
9. Modeling Infectious Diseases with Cellular Automata Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
10. Working with Social Graphs Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
11. Working with Twitter Data Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
12. Data Processing and Aggregation with MongoDB Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
13. Working with MapReduce Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
14. Online Data Analysis with Jupyter and Wakari Chevron down icon Chevron up icon
15. Understanding Data Processing using Apache Spark Chevron down icon Chevron up icon

Customer reviews

Rating distribution
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Half star icon Empty star icon 3.5
(2 Ratings)
5 star 50%
4 star 0%
3 star 0%
2 star 50%
1 star 0%
Jose Arturo Mora Soto Feb 10, 2018
Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon Full star icon 5
Becoming a data scientist is not trivial, definitely one of the firts steps is to learn how to manipulate data to obtain initial insights, I found this book a great source to start handling data with python, I really recommend this book but be aware that in order to have a better understanding you should need previous experience with python.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
Amazon Customer Oct 21, 2017
Full star icon Full star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon Empty star icon 2
The authors may be experts in data analysis but they are not doing a good job of explaining it. If you are new to data analysis, this book will get you totally confused.
Amazon Verified review Amazon
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