Python Data Science Essentials: Become an efficient data science practitioner by thoroughly understanding the key concepts of Python

by Alberto Boschetti (Author), Luca Massaron (Author)

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ISBN-13: 978-1785280429

ISBN-10: 1785280422

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Python Data Science Essentials: A practitioner's guide covering essential data science principles, tools, and techniques, 3rd Edition
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Key Features

Quickly get familiar with data science using Python
Save time - and effort - with all the essential tools explained
Create effective data science projects and avoid common pitfalls with the help of examples and hints dictated by experience

Book Description

The book starts by introducing you to setting up your essential data science toolbox. Then it will guide you across all the data munging and preprocessing phases. This will be done in a manner that explains all the core data science activities related to loading data, transforming and fixing it for analysis, as well as exploring and processing it. Finally, it will complete the overview by presenting you with the main machine learning algorithms, the graph analysis technicalities, and all the visualization instruments that can make your life easier in presenting your results.

In this walkthrough, structured as a data science project, you will always be accompanied by clear code and simplified examples to help you understand the underlying mechanics and real-world datasets.

What you will learn

Set up your data science toolbox using a Python scientific environment on Windows, Mac, and Linux
Get data ready for your data science project
Manipulate, fix, and explore data in order to solve data science problems
Set up an experimental pipeline to test your data science hypothesis
Choose the most effective and scalable learning algorithm for your data science tasks
Optimize your machine learning models to get the best performance
Explore and cluster graphs, taking advantage of interconnections and links in your data

First Steps
Data Munging
The Data Science Pipeline
Machine Learning
Social Network Analysis
Visualization

Alberto Boschetti
5
Paperback
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Ian H. Witten
96
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35 offers from $28.94
Ian Goodfellow
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49 offers from $39.95

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Alberto Boschetti
Alberto Boschetti is a data scientist with expertise in signal processing and statistics. He holds a PhD in telecommunication engineering and currently lives and works in London. In his work projects, he faces challenges involving natural language processing (NLP), machine learning, and probabilistic graph models everyday. He is very passionate about his job and he always tries to stay updated on the latest developments in data science technologies by attending meetups, conferences, and other events.

Luca Massaron
Luca Massaron is a data scientist and marketing research director who specializes in multivariate statistical analysis, machine learning, and customer insight, with over a decade of experience in solving real-world problems and generating value for stakeholders by applying reasoning, statistics, data mining, and algorithms. From being a pioneer of web audience analysis in Italy to achieving the rank of a top 10 Kaggler, he has always been passionate about everything regarding data and analysis and about demonstrating the potentiality of data-driven knowledge discovery to both experts and nonexperts. Favoring simplicity over unnecessary sophistication, he believes that a lot can be achieved in data science by understanding its essentials.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Packt Publishing (April 30, 2015)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 258 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1785280422
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1785280429
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7.5 x 0.59 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #3,131,141 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #764 in Mainframes & Minicomputers (Books)
- #1,022 in Business Intelligence Tools
- #1,665 in Data Modeling & Design (Books)

Customer Reviews:
8 ratings

About the authors

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Luca Massaron
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Luca Massaron is a data scientist and a research director specialized in multivariate statistical analysis, machine learning and customer insight with over a decade of experience in solving real world problems and in generating value for stakeholders by applying reasoning, statistics, data mining and algorithms. From being a pioneer of Web audience analysis in Italy to achieving the rank of top ten data scientist at competitions held by kaggle.com, he has always been passionate about everything regarding data and analysis and about demonstrating the potentiality of data-driven knowledge discovery to both experts and non-experts. Favouring simplicity over unnecessary sophistication, he believes that a lot can be achieved in data science just by doing the essential.
See more on the author's page
Alberto Boschetti
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Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Alberto Boschetti is a data scientist, with strong expertise in signal processing and statistics. He holds a Ph.D. in Telecommunication Engineering and currently lives and works in London. In his work projects he daily faces challenges spanning among natural language processing (NLP), machine learning and probabilistic graph models. He is very passionate about his job and he always tries to be updated on the latest development of data science technologies, attending meetups, conferences and other events.
See more on the author's page

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Top reviews from the United States

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Bibliophage

This is the book I would have written for myself

Reviewed in the United States on June 6, 2015

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I am a senior engineer with years of experience working primarily in C, C#, perl, and T-SQL. I have basic python, and dusty memories of two years of college math. In the last year, my data set has ballooned at the rate of 1Tb every two months and will soon exceed the handling capacity of my old analytics stack. Blessed by my manager with a shiny new hadoop cluster and time to study, I'm learning new tricks. This book is one of the first I found, and for me it was perfect. It reads like a walk-through from a smart coworker: enough to get me going, the most important moving parts, a few gotchas, where to go for help, some simple working examples... It got me moving on my first project in just a few hours. This is the book I'd have written for myself.

18 people found this helpful

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Carlo Erminero

A lot of practical examples: useful for beginners

Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 2015

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It is the book I wish I had available when I was starting a recent research project.
In little more than 200 pages it delivers the essential you need to know if you want to do data science and use Python for that (and you should, the authors suggest!). The part of the book I have particularly appreciated is the list of problems you have to face in practice and the proposed solution: loading your data in a fast and easy way by different sources, for instance, or the way to build and tune complex machine learning models for regression and classification problems. Your data can't fit into memory? It happens, as you know. Well there's a paragraph just for that and there are clear and efficient coding examples to solve the problem. I feel safer with this book with so many examples and solutions. Some books I was looking for help in my projects. This one appears to be very useful.
Carlo.

14 people found this helpful

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Jay. L

comprehensive yet concise, good for refreshing

Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2016

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compared with other data science book in python, this one is thinner but still comprehensive. Not the best if you want to start learning all the tools and methods, but great for reviewing and refreshing what you've learnt from other places

One person found this helpful

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William N

Book is JUNK!

Reviewed in the United States on November 5, 2015

Verified Purchase

In the first 2 chapters there are four errors in the programs that are used as examples. I sent three requests including screenshots of the errors to the support link for assistance with only one response which was that they would send my issue to the author. I never heard back. It has a publishing date of April 2015 yet is does not address the change of ipython notebook to jupyter. The book is junk! Don't waste your money!

8 people found this helpful

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Oleg Okun

Must to read and have it on your bookshelf, whether you are a Pythonista or not

Reviewed in the United States on December 6, 2015

Although I am an experienced Data Scientist who knows well Python's stack for Data Science (scikit-learn, pandas, statsmodels, numpy, scipy, matplotlib, IPython), this book captured my attention and I have read a half of it during the first two days after getting the book. This book is easy to read for novices and experts alike (it does not contain a lot of math and wherever there are formulas they are not difficult to grasp), though some familiarity with Python packages comprising the Data Science stack will greatly facilitate material understanding. The writing style authors chose is excellent as it teaches readers in a very logical and pedagogically appealing way: the way of data pre-processing and analysis occur in projects that data scientists and engineers often encounter when aiming to solve the real-worlds tasks.

The books begins with a description of how to install Python and various packages needed to run the code. The purpose of these packages is also explained. Different Python distributions are briefly discussed together with their characteristics, so that a reader can select a distribution particularly suitable to his/her needs. As all code examples in the book are run in IPython Notebook, special attention is paid to a short but comprehensive introduction into IPython itself. Data sets used in the book are described too.

After advising on installation of Python and its packages, the book guides readers towards fast and easy data loading from a file, including the case when the entire data set cannot be loaded during one read in the memory and the solution offered is to load it in chunks by using pandas.
Furthermore, answers to the following problems are provided: how to deal with erroneous records, how to treat categorical and text data, what are useful data cleansing and transformation operations implemented in pandas, how to use the optimized data structures - numpy arrays - and what operations on them can be done.

Once data is loaded and converted to a suitable representation, the book then spends a chapter on the general Data Science pipeline that can be implemented with scikit-learn. The pipeline includes dimensionality reduction via either feature extraction or feature selection, outlier detection, predictive modeling (classification and regression), optimization of model's hyper-parameters, and model's performance evaluation. This material creates the holistic view what typical data analysis is comprised of.

The next chapter introduces several popular machine learning algorithms in detail. Among them are linear and logistic regression, Naive Bayes, support vector machines, bagging and boosting ensembles. Special attention is paid to scikit-learn solutions of the 3Vs of big data: namely, volume, velocity and variety. Scalability with volume is solved with incremental learning when at any given moment of time, only a portion (batch) of the entire data fit to the available memory is used to update a model, hence, a model learns incrementally as new batches arrive. To keep up with velocity, scikit-learn offers a number of classification and regression algorithms optimized for speed. Data variety is deal with the help of hashing and sparse matrices. The chapter ends with short examples of doing basic operations of Natural Language Processing with the NLTK package and data clustering.

Final two chapters are devoted to social network analysis with the NetworkX package and data visualization with the matplotlib and pandas packages, respectively.

Although I have both paper and electronic versions of this book, I would advise first to buy the paper version as numerous code is much easier to understand in this format because one can see the entire snapshot at once.

6 people found this helpful

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Mary Anne Thygesen

Useful Book using Pyhon for Data Science

Reviewed in the United States on December 18, 2015

The book covers fundamentals of Data Science. Code for the book is available from the publisher. I used Anaconda Launcher which nicely converted the notebooks to jupyter and ran them well. My favorite chapter was chapter five Social Network Analysis. I like the table on graph examples, type, node and edges. It is useful for writing code.

3 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

Great book for learning data science in Python

Reviewed in Canada on October 6, 2015

Verified Purchase

I have some R experience and wanted to learn Python for data science. This book is great for that. Chapters are nicely layer out, starting from preprocessing, feature selection and then machine learning models. It even has a section on Restricted Boltzmann Machines for image analysis.

One person found this helpful

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