Python Libraries
Throughout this book, we'll be using various Python libraries, including pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn, and scikit-learn.
pandas
pandas is an open source package that has many functions for loading and processing data in order to prepare it for machine learning tasks. It also has tools that can be used to analyze and manipulate data. Data can be read from many formats using pandas. We will mainly be using CSV data throughout this book. To read CSV data, you can use the read_csv() function by passing filename.csv as an argument. An example of this is shown here:
>>> import pandas as pd
>>> pd.read_csv("data.csv")
In the preceding code, pd is an alias name given to pandas. It is not mandatory to give an alias. To visualize a pandas DataFrame, you can use the head() function to list the top five rows. This will be demonstrated in one of the following exercises.
Note
Please visit the following link to learn more about pandas: https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/.
NumPy
NumPy is one of the main packages that Python has to offer. It is mainly used in practices related to scientific computing and when working on mathematical operations. It comprises of tools that enable us to work with arrays and array objects.
Matplotlib
Matplotlib is a data visualization package. It is useful for plotting data points in a 2D space with the help of NumPy.
Seaborn
Seaborn is also a data visualization library that is based on matplotlib. Visualizations created using Seaborn are far more attractive than ones created using matplotlib in terms of graphics.
scikit-learn
scikit-learn is a Python package used for machine learning. It is designed in such a way that it interoperates with other numeric and scientific libraries in Python to achieve the implementation of algorithms.
These ready-to-use libraries have gained interest and attention from developers, especially in the data science space. Now that we have covered the various libraries in Python, in the next section we'll explore the roadmap for building machine learning models.
