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Practical Data Wrangling

By : Visochek

Buy this Book

Practical Data Wrangling

By: Visochek

Buy this Book

Overview of this book

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them. You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases. The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.

Preface

What this book covers

What you need for this book

Who this book is for

Conventions

Reader feedback

Customer support

Free Chapter

Programming with Data

Understanding data wrangling

The tools for data wrangling

Summary

Introduction to Programming in Python

External resources

Logistical overview

Running programs in python

Data types, variables, and the Python shell

Compound statements

Making annotations within programs

A programmer's resources

Summary

Reading, Exploring, and Modifying Data - Part I

External resources

Logistical overview

Introducing a basic data wrangling work flow

Introducing the JSON file format

Opening and closing a file in Python using file I/O

Reading the contents of a file

Exploring the contents of a data file

Modifying a dataset

Outputting the modified data to a new file

Specifying input and output file names in the Terminal

Summary

Reading, Exploring, and Modifying Data - Part II

Logistical overview

Understanding the CSV format

Introducing the CSV module

Using the CSV module to read CSV data

Using the CSV module to write CSV data

Using the pandas module to read and process data

Handling non-standard CSV encoding and dialect

Understanding XML

Using the XML module to parse XML data

Summary

Manipulating Text Data - An Introduction to Regular Expressions

Logistical overview

Understanding the need for pattern recognition

Introducting regular expressions

Looking for patterns

Quantifying the existence of patterns

Extracting patterns

Summary

Cleaning Numerical Data - An Introduction to R and RStudio

Logistical overview

Introducing R and RStudio

Familiarizing yourself with RStudio

Conducting basic outlier detection and removal

Handling NA values

Variable names and contents

Summary

Simplifying Data Manipulation with dplyr

Logistical overview

Introducing dplyr

Getting started with dplyr

Chaining operations together

Filtering the rows of a dataframe

Summarizing data by category

Rewriting code using dplyr

Summary

Getting Data from the Web

Logistical overview

Introducing APIs

Using Python to retrieve data from APIs

Using URL parameters to filter the results

Summary

Working with Large Datasets

Logistical overview

Understanding computer memory

Understanding databases

Introducing MongoDB

Interfacing with MongoDB from Python

Summary

Customer Reviews

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Cleaning Numerical Data - An Introduction to R and RStudio

The philosophy behind the previous chapters leading up to this point has been to take a generalized programming approach to data wrangling. A good grasp of the underlying programming techniques involved in manipulating data gives you the ability to tackle non-standard problems in data wrangling when they are encountered.

However, a large number of tasks can be more concisely and elegantly expressed with a language specific to data manipulation. In many cases, the R environment and programming language can allow you to express more with less. On top of that, several packages built on top of R can make the language even more concise and expressive. In this chapter and the next, I will show you how R can be used to take a more formulated approach to data wrangling. This chapter will be an introduction to R with the application...