It happened a few years back. After working on SAS for more than 5 years, I decided to move out of my comfort zone. Being a data scientist, my hunt for other useful tools was ON! Fortunately, it didn’t take me long to decide – Python was my appetizer.
I always had an inclination for coding. This was the time to do what I really loved. Code. Turned out, coding was actually quite easy!
I learned the basics of Python within a week. And, since then, I’ve not only explored this language to the depth, but also have helped many other to learn this language. Python was originally a general purpose language. But, over the years, with strong community support, this language got dedicated library for data analysis and predictive modeling.
Due to lack of resource on python for data science, I decided to create this tutorial to help many others to learn python faster. In this tutorial, we will take bite sized information about how to use Python for Data Analysis, chew it till we are comfortable and practice it at our own end. A complete python tutorial from scratch in data science.
You can also check out the ‘Introduction to Data Science‘ course – a comprehensive introduction to the world of data science. It includes modules on Python, Statistics and Predictive Modeling along with multiple practical projects to get your hands dirty.
Python has gathered a lot of interest recently as a choice of language for data analysis. I had basics of Python some time back. Here are some reasons which go in favour of learning Python:
Needless to say, it still has few drawbacks too:
This is one of the most debated topics in Python. You will invariably cross paths with it, specially if you are a beginner. There is no right/wrong choice here. It totally depends on the situation and your need to use. I will try to give you some pointers to help you make an informed choice.
There is no clear winner but I suppose the bottom line is that you should focus on learning Python as a language. Shifting between versions should just be a matter of time. Stay tuned for a dedicated article on Python 2.x vs 3.x in the near future!
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There are 2 approaches to install Python:
You can download Python directly from its project site and install individual components and libraries you want
Alternately, you can download and install a package, which comes with pre-installed libraries. I would recommend downloading Anaconda. Another option could be Enthought Canopy Express.
The imitation of this approach is you have to wait for the entire package to be upgraded, even if you are interested in the latest version of a single library. It should not matter until and unless, until and unless, you are doing cutting edge statistical research.
Once you have installed Python, there are various options for choosing an environment. Here are the 3 most common options:
IDLE editor for Python
While the right environment depends on your need, I personally prefer iPython Notebooks a lot. It provides a lot of good features for documenting while writing the code itself and you can choose to run the code in blocks (rather than the line by line execution)
We will use iPython environment for this complete tutorial.
You can use Python as a simple calculator to start with:
Before we deep dive into problem solving, lets take a step back and understand the basics of Python. As we know that data structures and iteration and conditional constructs form the crux of any language. In Python, these include lists, strings, tuples, dictionaries, for-loop, while-loop, if-else, etc. Let’s take a look at some of these.
Following are some data structures, which are used in Python. You should be familiar with them in order to use them as appropriate.
Here is a quick example to define a list and then access it:
Since Tuples are immutable and can not change, they are faster in processing as compared to lists. Hence, if your list is unlikely to change, you should use tuples, instead of lists.
Like most languages, Python also has a FOR-loop which is the most widely used method for iteration. It has a simple syntax:
for i in [Python Iterable]: expression(i)
Here “Python Iterable” can be a list, tuple or other advanced data structures which we will explore in later sections. Let’s take a look at a simple example, determining the factorial of a number.
fact=1 for i in range(1,N+1): fact *= i
Coming to conditional statements, these are used to execute code fragments based on a condition. The most commonly used construct is if-else, with following syntax:
if [condition]: __execution if true__ else: __execution if false__
For instance, if we want to print whether the number N is even or odd:
if N%2 == 0: print ('Even') else: print ('Odd')
Now that you are familiar with Python fundamentals, let’s take a step further. What if you have to perform the following tasks:
If you try to write code from scratch, its going to be a nightmare and you won’t stay on Python for more than 2 days! But lets not worry about that. Thankfully, there are many libraries with predefined which we can directly import into our code and make our life easy.
For example, consider the factorial example we just saw. We can do that in a single step as:
math.factorial(N)
Off-course we need to import the math library for that. Lets explore the various libraries next.
Lets take one step ahead in our journey to learn Python by getting acquainted with some useful libraries. The first step is obviously to learn to import them into our environment. There are several ways of doing so in Python:
import math as m
from math import *
In the first manner, we have defined an alias m to library math. We can now use various functions from math library (e.g. factorial) by referencing it using the alias m.factorial().
In the second manner, you have imported the entire name space in math i.e. you can directly use factorial() without referring to math.
Tip: Google recommends that you use first style of importing libraries, as you will know where the functions have come from.
Following are a list of libraries, you will need for any scientific computations and data analysis:
Library | Description |
---|---|
NumPy | Powerful for n-dimensional arrays, linear algebra, Fourier transforms, and integration with other languages. |
SciPy | Built on NumPy, ideal for science and engineering tasks like Fourier transforms, Linear Algebra, and Optimization. |
Matplotlib | Versatile plotting, from histograms to heat plots. Offers inline plotting and supports LaTeX commands for math. |
Pandas | Essential for structured data operations, widely used in data munging and preparation for data science. |
Scikit Learn | Efficient tools for machine learning and statistical modeling, including classification, regression, and clustering. |
Statsmodels | For statistical modeling, provides descriptive statistics, tests, and plotting functions across various data types. |
Seaborn | Aims for attractive statistical data visualization, built on Matplotlib, making exploration and understanding of data central. |
Bokeh | Creates interactive plots, dashboards, and data applications for modern web browsers, with high-performance interactivity. |
Blaze | Extends NumPy and Pandas capabilities to distributed and streaming datasets, accessing data from various sources. |
Scrapy | Web crawling framework, useful for extracting specific data patterns by navigating through web-pages within a website. |
SymPy | For symbolic computation, covers arithmetic to quantum physics, with the capability to format results as LaTeX code. |
Requests | Simplifies web access compared to urllib2, convenient for beginners with slight differences. |
Now that we are familiar with Python fundamentals and additional libraries, lets take a deep dive into problem solving through Python. Yes I mean making a predictive model! In the process, we use some powerful libraries and also come across the next level of data structures. We will take you through the 3 key phases:
In order to explore our data further, let me introduce you to another animal (as if Python was not enough!) – Pandas
Pandas is one of the most useful data analysis library in Python (I know these names sounds weird, but hang on!). They have been instrumental in increasing the use of Python in data science community. We will now use Pandas to read a data set from an Analytics Vidhya competition, perform exploratory analysis and build our first basic categorization algorithm for solving this problem.
Before loading the data, lets understand the 2 key data structures in Pandas – Series and DataFrames
Series can be understood as a 1 dimensional labelled / indexed array. You can access individual elements of this series through these labels.
A dataframe is similar to Excel workbook – you have column names referring to columns and you have rows, which can be accessed with use of row numbers. The essential difference being that column names and row numbers are known as column and row index, in case of dataframes.
Series and dataframes form the core data model for Pandas in Python. The data sets are first to read into these dataframes and then various operations (e.g. group by, aggregation etc.) can be applied very easily to its columns.
More: 10 Minutes to Pandas
You can download the dataset from here. Here is the description of the variables:
VARIABLE DESCRIPTIONS: Variable Description Loan_ID Unique Loan ID Gender Male/ Female Married Applicant married (Y/N) Dependents Number of dependents Education Applicant Education (Graduate/ Under Graduate) Self_Employed Self employed (Y/N) ApplicantIncome Applicant income CoapplicantIncome Coapplicant income LoanAmount Loan amount in thousands Loan_Amount_Term Term of loan in months Credit_History credit history meets guidelines Property_Area Urban/ Semi Urban/ Rural Loan_Status Loan approved (Y/N)
To begin, start iPython interface in Inline Pylab mode by typing following on your terminal/windows command prompt:
ipython notebook --pylab=inline
This opens up iPython notebook in pylab environment, which has a few useful libraries already imported. Also, you will be able to plot your data inline, which makes this a really good environment for interactive data analysis. You can check whether the environment has loaded correctly, by typing the following command (and getting the output as seen in the figure below):
plot(arange(5))
I am currently working in Linux, and have stored the dataset in the following location:
/home/kunal/Downloads/Loan_Prediction/train.csv
Following are the libraries we will use during this tutorial:
Please note that you do not need to import matplotlib and numpy because of Pylab environment. I have still kept them in the code, in case you use the code in a different environment.
After importing the library, you read the dataset using function read_csv(). This is how the code looks like till this stage:
import pandas as pd import numpy as np import matplotlib as plt %matplotlib inline df = pd.read_csv("/home/kunal/Downloads/Loan_Prediction/train.csv") #Reading the dataset in a dataframe using Pandas
Once you have read the dataset, you can have a look at few top rows by using the function head()
df.head(10)
This should print 10 rows. Alternately, you can also look at more rows by printing the dataset.
Next, you can look at summary of numerical fields by using describe() function
df.describe()
describe() function would provide count, mean, standard deviation (std), min, quartiles and max in its output (Read this article to refresh basic statistics to understand population distribution)
Here are a few inferences, you can draw by looking at the output of describe() function:
Please note that we can get an idea of a possible skew in the data by comparing the mean to the median, i.e. the 50% figure.
For the non-numerical values (e.g. Property_Area, Credit_History etc.), we can look at frequency distribution to understand whether they make sense or not. The frequency table can be printed by following command:
df['Property_Area'].value_counts()
Similarly, we can look at unique values of port of credit history. Note that dfname[‘column_name’] is a basic indexing technique to acess a particular column of the dataframe. It can be a list of columns as well. For more information, refer to the “10 Minutes to Pandas” resource shared above.
Now that we are familiar with basic data characteristics, let us study distribution of various variables. Let us start with numeric variables – namely ApplicantIncome and LoanAmount
Lets start by plotting the histogram of ApplicantIncome using the following commands:
df['ApplicantIncome'].hist(bins=50)
Here we observe that there are few extreme values. This is also the reason why 50 bins are required to depict the distribution clearly.
Next, we look at box plots to understand the distributions. Box plot for fare can be plotted by:
df.boxplot(column='ApplicantIncome')
This confirms the presence of a lot of outliers/extreme values. This can be attributed to the income disparity in the society. Part of this can be driven by the fact that we are looking at people with different education levels. Let us segregate them by Education:
df.boxplot(column='ApplicantIncome', by = 'Education')
We can see that there is no substantial different between the mean income of graduate and non-graduates. But there are a higher number of graduates with very high incomes, which are appearing to be the outliers.
Now, Let’s look at the histogram and boxplot of LoanAmount using the following command:
df['LoanAmount'].hist(bins=50)
df.boxplot(column='LoanAmount')
Again, there are some extreme values. Clearly, both ApplicantIncome and LoanAmount require some amount of data munging. LoanAmount has missing and well as extreme values values, while ApplicantIncome has a few extreme values, which demand deeper understanding. We will take this up in coming sections.
Now that we understand distributions for ApplicantIncome and LoanIncome, let us understand categorical variables in more details. We will use Excel style pivot table and cross-tabulation. For instance, let us look at the chances of getting a loan based on credit history. This can be achieved in MS Excel using a pivot table as:
Note: here loan status has been coded as 1 for Yes and 0 for No. So the mean represents the probability of getting loan.
Now we will look at the steps required to generate a similar insight using Python. Please refer to this article for getting a hang of the different data manipulation techniques in Pandas.
temp1 = df['Credit_History'].value_counts(ascending=True) temp2 = df.pivot_table(values='Loan_Status',index=['Credit_History'],aggfunc=lambda x: x.map({'Y':1,'N':0}).mean()) print ('Frequency Table for Credit History:') print (temp1) print ('\nProbility of getting loan for each Credit History class:') print (temp2)
Now we can observe that we get a similar pivot_table like the MS Excel one. This can be plotted as a bar chart using the “matplotlib” library with following code:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8,4)) ax1 = fig.add_subplot(121) ax1.set_xlabel('Credit_History') ax1.set_ylabel('Count of Applicants') ax1.set_title("Applicants by Credit_History") temp1.plot(kind='bar') ax2 = fig.add_subplot(122) temp2.plot(kind = 'bar') ax2.set_xlabel('Credit_History') ax2.set_ylabel('Probability of getting loan') ax2.set_title("Probability of getting loan by credit history")
This shows that the chances of getting a loan are eight-fold if the applicant has a valid credit history. You can plot similar graphs by Married, Self-Employed, Property_Area, etc.
Alternately, these two plots can also be visualized by combining them in a stacked chart::
temp3 = pd.crosstab(df['Credit_History'], df['Loan_Status']) temp3.plot(kind='bar', stacked=True, color=['red','blue'], grid=False)
You can also add gender into the mix (similar to the pivot table in Excel):
If you have not realized already, we have just created two basic classification algorithms here, one based on credit history, while other on 2 categorical variables (including gender). You can quickly code this to create your first submission on AV Datahacks.
We just saw how we can do exploratory analysis in Python using Pandas. I hope your love for pandas (the animal) would have increased by now – given the amount of help, the library can provide you in analyzing datasets.
Next let’s explore ApplicantIncome and LoanStatus variables further, perform data munging and create a dataset for applying various modeling techniques. I would strongly urge that you take another dataset and problem and go through an independent example before reading further.
For those, who have been following, here are your must wear shoes to start running.
While our exploration of the data, we found a few problems in the data set, which needs to be solved before the data is ready for a good model. This exercise is typically referred as “Data Munging”. Here are the problems, we are already aware of:
In addition to these problems with numerical fields, we should also look at the non-numerical fields i.e. Gender, Property_Area, Married, Education and Dependents to see, if they contain any useful information.
If you are new to Pandas, I would recommend reading this article before moving on. It details some useful techniques of data manipulation.
Let us look at missing values in all the variables because most of the models don’t work with missing data and even if they do, imputing them helps more often than not. So, let us check the number of nulls / NaNs in the dataset
df.apply(lambda x: sum(x.isnull()),axis=0)
This command should tell us the number of missing values in each column as isnull() returns 1, if the value is null.
Though the missing values are not very high in number, but many variables have them and each one of these should be estimated and added in the data. Get a detailed view on different imputation techniques through this article.
Note: Remember that missing values may not always be NaNs. For instance, if the Loan_Amount_Term is 0, does it makes sense or would you consider that missing? I suppose your answer is missing and you’re right. So we should check for values which are unpractical.
There are numerous ways to fill the missing values of loan amount – the simplest being replacement by mean, which can be done by following code:
df['LoanAmount'].fillna(df['LoanAmount'].mean(), inplace=True)
The other extreme could be to build a supervised learning model to predict loan amount on the basis of other variables and then use age along with other variables to predict survival.
Since, the purpose now is to bring out the steps in data munging, I’ll rather take an approach, which lies some where in between these 2 extremes. A key hypothesis is that the whether a person is educated or self-employed can combine to give a good estimate of loan amount.
First, let’s look at the boxplot to see if a trend exists:
Thus we see some variations in the median of loan amount for each group and this can be used to impute the values. But first, we have to ensure that each of Self_Employed and Education variables should not have a missing values.
As we say earlier, Self_Employed has some missing values. Let’s look at the frequency table:
Since ~86% values are “No”, it is safe to impute the missing values as “No” as there is a high probability of success. This can be done using the following code:
df['Self_Employed'].fillna('No',inplace=True)
Now, we will create a Pivot table, which provides us median values for all the groups of unique values of Self_Employed and Education features. Next, we define a function, which returns the values of these cells and apply it to fill the missing values of loan amount:
table = df.pivot_table(values='LoanAmount', index='Self_Employed' ,columns='Education', aggfunc=np.median) # Define function to return value of this pivot_table def fage(x): return table.loc[x['Self_Employed'],x['Education']] # Replace missing values df['LoanAmount'].fillna(df[df['LoanAmount'].isnull()].apply(fage, axis=1), inplace=True)
This should provide you a good way to impute missing values of loan amount.
NOTE : This method will work only if you have not filled the missing values in Loan_Amount variable using the previous approach, i.e. using mean.
Let’s analyze LoanAmount first. Since the extreme values are practically possible, i.e. some people might apply for high value loans due to specific needs. So instead of treating them as outliers, let’s try a log transformation to nullify their effect:
df['LoanAmount_log'] = np.log(df['LoanAmount']) df['LoanAmount_log'].hist(bins=20)
Looking at the histogram again:
Now the distribution looks much closer to normal and effect of extreme values has been significantly subsided.
Coming to ApplicantIncome. One intuition can be that some applicants have lower income but strong support Co-applicants. So it might be a good idea to combine both incomes as total income and take a log transformation of the same.
df['TotalIncome'] = df['ApplicantIncome'] + df['CoapplicantIncome'] df['TotalIncome_log'] = np.log(df['TotalIncome']) df['LoanAmount_log'].hist(bins=20)
Now we see that the distribution is much better than before. I will leave it upto you to impute the missing values for Gender, Married, Dependents, Loan_Amount_Term, Credit_History. Also, I encourage you to think about possible additional information which can be derived from the data. For example, creating a column for LoanAmount/TotalIncome might make sense as it gives an idea of how well the applicant is suited to pay back his loan.
Next, we will look at making predictive models.
After, we have made the data useful for modeling, let’s now look at the python code to create a predictive model on our data set. Skicit-Learn (sklearn) is the most commonly used library in Python for this purpose and we will follow the trail. I encourage you to get a refresher on sklearn through this article.
Since, sklearn requires all inputs to be numeric, we should convert all our categorical variables into numeric by encoding the categories. Before that we will fill all the missing values in the dataset. This can be done using the following code:
df['Gender'].fillna(df['Gender'].mode()[0], inplace=True) df['Married'].fillna(df['Married'].mode()[0], inplace=True) df['Dependents'].fillna(df['Dependents'].mode()[0], inplace=True) df['Loan_Amount_Term'].fillna(df['Loan_Amount_Term'].mode()[0], inplace=True) df['Credit_History'].fillna(df['Credit_History'].mode()[0], inplace=True)
from sklearn.preprocessing import LabelEncoder var_mod = ['Gender','Married','Dependents','Education','Self_Employed','Property_Area','Loan_Status'] le = LabelEncoder() for i in var_mod: df[i] = le.fit_transform(df[i]) df.dtypes
Next, we will import the required modules. Then we will define a generic classification function, which takes a model as input and determines the Accuracy and Cross-Validation scores. Since this is an introductory article, I will not go into the details of coding. Please refer to this article for getting details of the algorithms with R and Python codes. Also, it’ll be good to get a refresher on cross-validation through this article, as it is a very important measure of power performance.
#Import models from scikit learn module: from sklearn.linear_model import LogisticRegression from sklearn.cross_validation import KFold #For K-fold cross validation from sklearn.ensemble import RandomForestClassifier from sklearn.tree import DecisionTreeClassifier, export_graphviz from sklearn import metrics #Generic function for making a classification model and accessing performance: def classification_model(model, data, predictors, outcome): #Fit the model: model.fit(data[predictors],data[outcome]) #Make predictions on training set: predictions = model.predict(data[predictors]) #Print accuracy accuracy = metrics.accuracy_score(predictions,data[outcome]) print ("Accuracy : %s" % "{0:.3%}".format(accuracy)) #Perform k-fold cross-validation with 5 folds kf = KFold(data.shape[0], n_folds=5) error = [] for train, test in kf: # Filter training data train_predictors = (data[predictors].iloc[train,:]) # The target we're using to train the algorithm. train_target = data[outcome].iloc[train] # Training the algorithm using the predictors and target. model.fit(train_predictors, train_target) #Record error from each cross-validation run error.append(model.score(data[predictors].iloc[test,:], data[outcome].iloc[test])) print ("Cross-Validation Score : %s" % "{0:.3%}".format(np.mean(error))) #Fit the model again so that it can be refered outside the function: model.fit(data[predictors],data[outcome])
Let’s make our first Logistic Regression model. One way would be to take all the variables into the model but this might result in overfitting (don’t worry if you’re unaware of this terminology yet). In simple words, taking all variables might result in the model understanding complex relations specific to the data and will not generalize well. Read more about Logistic Regression.
We can easily make some intuitive hypothesis to set the ball rolling. The chances of getting a loan will be higher for:
So let’s make our first model with ‘Credit_History’.
outcome_var = 'Loan_Status' model = LogisticRegression() predictor_var = ['Credit_History'] classification_model(model, df,predictor_var,outcome_var)
Accuracy : 80.945% Cross-Validation Score : 80.946%
#We can try different combination of variables: predictor_var = ['Credit_History','Education','Married','Self_Employed','Property_Area'] classification_model(model, df,predictor_var,outcome_var)
Accuracy : 80.945% Cross-Validation Score : 80.946%
Generally we expect the accuracy to increase on adding variables. But this is a more challenging case. The accuracy and cross-validation score are not getting impacted by less important variables. Credit_History is dominating the mode. We have two options now:
Decision tree is another method for making a predictive model. It is known to provide higher accuracy than logistic regression model. Read more about Decision Trees.
model = DecisionTreeClassifier() predictor_var = ['Credit_History','Gender','Married','Education'] classification_model(model, df,predictor_var,outcome_var)
Accuracy : 81.930% Cross-Validation Score : 76.656%
Here the model based on categorical variables is unable to have an impact because Credit History is dominating over them. Let’s try a few numerical variables:
#We can try different combination of variables: predictor_var = ['Credit_History','Loan_Amount_Term','LoanAmount_log'] classification_model(model, df,predictor_var,outcome_var)
Accuracy : 92.345% Cross-Validation Score : 71.009%
Here we observed that although the accuracy went up on adding variables, the cross-validation error went down. This is the result of model over-fitting the data. Let’s try an even more sophisticated algorithm and see if it helps:
Random forest is another algorithm for solving the classification problem. Read more about Random Forest.
An advantage with Random Forest is that we can make it work with all the features and it returns a feature importance matrix which can be used to select features.
model = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=100) predictor_var = ['Gender', 'Married', 'Dependents', 'Education', 'Self_Employed', 'Loan_Amount_Term', 'Credit_History', 'Property_Area', 'LoanAmount_log','TotalIncome_log'] classification_model(model, df,predictor_var,outcome_var)
Accuracy : 100.000% Cross-Validation Score : 78.179%
Here we see that the accuracy is 100% for the training set. This is the ultimate case of overfitting and can be resolved in two ways:
Let’s try both of these. First we see the feature importance matrix from which we’ll take the most important features.
#Create a series with feature importances: featimp = pd.Series(model.feature_importances_, index=predictor_var).sort_values(ascending=False) print (featimp)
Let’s use the top 5 variables for creating a model. Also, we will modify the parameters of random forest model a little bit:
model = RandomForestClassifier(n_estimators=25, min_samples_split=25, max_depth=7, max_features=1) predictor_var = ['TotalIncome_log','LoanAmount_log','Credit_History','Dependents','Property_Area'] classification_model(model, df,predictor_var,outcome_var)
Accuracy : 82.899% Cross-Validation Score : 81.461%
Notice that although accuracy reduced, but the cross-validation score is improving showing that the model is generalizing well. Remember that random forest models are not exactly repeatable. Different runs will result in slight variations because of randomization. But the output should stay in the ballpark.
You would have noticed that even after some basic parameter tuning on random forest, we have reached a cross-validation accuracy only slightly better than the original logistic regression model. This exercise gives us some very interesting and unique learning:
You can access the dataset and problem statement used in this post at this link: Loan Prediction Challenge
Now, its time to take the plunge and actually play with some other real datasets. So are you ready to take on the challenge? Accelerate your data science journey with the following Practice Problems:
![]() | Practice Problem: Food Demand Forecasting Challenge | Predict the demand of meals for a meal delivery company |
![]() | Practice Problem: HR Analytics Challenge | Identify the employees most likely to get promoted |
![]() | Practice Problem: Predict Number of Upvotes | Predict number of upvotes on a query asked at an online question & answer platform |
I hope this tutorial will help you maximize your efficiency when starting with data science in Python. I am sure this not only gave you an idea about basic data analysis methods but it also showed you how to implement some of the more sophisticated techniques available today.
You should also check out our free Python course and then jump over to learn how to apply it for Data Science.
Python is really a great tool and is becoming an increasingly popular language among the data scientists. The reason being, it’s easy to learn, integrates well with other databases and tools like Spark and Hadoop. Majorly, it has the great computational intensity and has powerful data analytics libraries.
So, learn Python to perform the full life-cycle of any data science project. It includes reading, analyzing, visualizing and finally making predictions.
If you come across any difficulty while practicing Python, or you have any thoughts /suggestions/feedback on the post, please feel free to post them through comments below.
A. To learn Python programming, you can start by familiarizing yourself with the language’s syntax, data types, control structures, functions, and modules. You can then practice coding by solving problems and building projects. Joining online communities, attending workshops, and taking online courses can also help you learn Python. With regular practice, persistence, and a willingness to learn, you can become proficient in Python and start developing software applications.
A. Python is used for a wide range of applications, including web development, data analysis, scientific computing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and automation. Python is a high-level, interpreted, and dynamically-typed language that offers ease of use, readability, and flexibility. Its vast library of modules and packages makes it a popular choice for developers looking to create powerful, efficient, and scalable software applications. Python’s popularity and versatility have made it one of the most widely used programming languages in the world today.
A. The four basics of Python are variables, data types, control structures, and functions. Variables are used to store values, data types define the type of data that can be stored, control structures dictate the flow of execution, and functions are reusable blocks of code. Understanding these four basics is essential for learning Python programming and developing software applications.
A. Yes, you can teach yourself Python. Start by learning the basics and practicing coding regularly. Join online communities to get help and collaborate on projects. Building projects is a great way to apply your knowledge and develop your skills. Remember to be persistent, learn from mistakes, and keep practicing.
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can you please suggest me good data analysis book on python
There is a very good book on Python for Data Analysis, O Reily -- Python for Data Analysis
Moumita, The book mentioned by Paritosh is a good place to start. You can also refer some of the books mentioned here: http://www.analyticsvidhya.com/blog/2014/06/books-data-scientists-or-aspiring-ones/ Hope this helps. Kunal
Hi Kunal, When you are planning to schedule next data science meetup in Bangalore. I have missed the previous session due to conflict
Pranesh, We will have a meetup some time in early March. We will announce the dates on DataHack platform and our meetup group page. Hope to see you around this time. Regards, Kunal
Little error just matter for newbe as I'm: import matplotlib.pyplot as plt fig = plt.pyplot.figure(figsize=(8,4)) Error import matplotlib.pyplot as plt fig = plt.figure(figsize=(8,4)) Right
Thanks Gianfranco for highlighting it. Have corrected the same. Regards, Kunal
Thank you so much Kunal, this is indeed a great start for any Python beginner. Really appreciate your team's effort in bringing Data Science to a wider audience. I strongly suggest "A Byte of Python" by Swaroop CH. It may be bit old now but helped me in getting a good start in Python.
Awesome!!! This is one area where I was looking for help and AV has provided it!!! Thanks a lot for the quick guide Kunal...very much helpful...
Glad that you liked it HighSpirits!
Great!!!!!! Thank you!. I was just looking around for this.
Thanks Kami888 for your comment. Do let us know how you progress with this. Regards, Kunal
Really well written, will be nice if it is made available as a pdf for download (with all supporting references). I will print and refer till I learn in full. Thanks
Hi kunal ji , Can you please guide (for a newbie )who dont have any software background , how can acquire big data knowledge. whether is it necessary to learn SQL , JAVA ?Before stepping in the big data practically, how can i warm up my self without getting in touch with the bias. Can you please suggest good blog regarding big data for newbie.
Smrutiranjan, : Kindly post this question on our discussion portal - http://discuss.analyticsvidhya.com This is not relevant to the article above. Regards, Kunal
This was good until, the fact hit me. I am using IDLE and don't have the libraries installed. Now, how do I get these Pandas, Numpy etc installed for IDLE on Windows!? Its been a long complicated browsing session. Only solution I seem to get is to ditch IDLE and move to Spyder or move to Python 3.5 altogether. Any solutions will be helpful, thank you.
I suggest installing anaconda. Its better to start with as it contains most of the commonly used libraries for data analysis. Once anaconda is up and working, you can use any IDE of your choice.
Got Pandas to finally install and work, here is how I did it. Just in case it helps somebody else. Download pip-installer from here: https://bootstrap.pypa.io/get-pip.py Put it on to desktop or some known path Open Command prompt and point to the path or open the path Execute the file in command prompt with: python get-pip.py Check if you got it right using: python -m pip install -U pip This will ensure that you are on the current version Restart the system, just for the heck of it. To be on safer side. In Command prompt, set the path using this: C:\users\yourname>set PATH = %PATH%;C:\python27\scripts Still in command prompt, install a library like: pip install numpy Should work (maybe) * I had a C++ compiler error, installing this resolved it: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=44266 Try installing libraries again * **Sources from all over the place!
Thank you for a real comprehensive post. Personally, I am mainly using Python for creating Psychology experiments but I would like to start doing some analysis with Python (right now I mainly use R). Some of the libraries (e.g., Seaborn) was new to me.
Hello ! I can't let this piece of code to work: table = df.pivot_table(values='LoanAmount', index='Self_Employed' ,columns='Education', aggfunc=np.median) # Define function to return value of this pivot_table def fage(x): return table.loc[x['Self_Employed'],x['Education']] # Replace missing values df['LoanAmount'].fillna(df[df['LoanAmount'].isnull()].apply(fage, axis=1), inplace=True) I've this error: ValueError: invalid fill value with a I checked the null values of the columns "LoanAmount", "Self_Employed" and "Education" and nothing wrong shows out. 614 values as others full columns. Someone else had the same error ?
Mr. gt_67, I have same the error do you have any idea what that could be? if Kunal can help understand and fix this piece of code will be great.
Missing values are already replaced by the mean with this line of code (1.st way) df['LoanAmount'].fillna(df['LoanAmount'].mean(), inplace=True) before. This part is the second way of replacing missing values so if you skip above line the code should work.
This is a great, great resource. Thanks Kunal. But let me ask you for curiosity is this how data scientist do at work, I mean it is like using a command like to get insight from the data, isn't there GUI with python so you can be more productive? Keep up the good work.
Hi Kunal, Thanks for the excellent tutorial using python. It would be great if you could do a similar tutorial using R. Regards, Kishore
Thank you Kunal for a real comprehensive tutorial on doing data science in Python! I really appreciated the list of libraires. Really useful. I have, my self, started to look more and more on doing data analysis with Python. I have tested pandas some and your exploratory analysis with-pandas part was also helpful.
Good One
Is there a python library for performing OCR on PDF files? or for converting a raw scanned PDF to a 'searchable' PDF? To perform Text Analytics...
Hey, great article. I find my self getting hiccups the moment probability and statistics start appearing. Can you suggest a book that takes me through these easily just like in this tutorial. Both of these seem to be the lifeline of ML.
Hey Kunal Im trying to follow your lesson however I am stuck at reading the CSV file. Im using Ipython and trying to read it. I am following the syntax that you have provided but it still doesnt work. Can you please help me if its possible I would really appreciate it Thanks Deepak
Hello Kunal i have started your tutorial but i am having difficulty at importing pandas an opening the csv file do you mind assisting me Thanks
Deepak, What is the problem you are facing? Can you attach a screenshot? Also, tell me which OS are you working on and which Python installation are you working on? Regards, Kunal
Hi Kunal Sincere apologies for a very basic question. I have installed python per above instructions. Unfortunately I am unable to launch ipython notebook. Have spent hours but I guess I missing something. Could you please kindly guide. Thank you Jaini
Jaini, What is the error you are getting? Which OS you are on? And what happens when you type ipython notebook in shell / terminal / cmd ? Regards, Kunal
Nice article! A few remarks: 1- "--pylab=inline" is not recommended any more. Use "%matplotlib inline" for each notebook. 2- You can start a jupyter server using "jupyter notebook" instead of "ipython notebook". For me, notebooks open faster that way. 3- For plotting, use "import matplotlib.pyplot as plt". Regards woiski
Thank you. I sincerely appreciate your instant response. I just reinstalled and went through command prompt and it worked.
IT would be good if you explained the code as you went along the exercise. For someone unfamiliar with some of the methods and functions, it is difficult to understand why you are doing certain things. For e.g.: While creating the pivot table, you introduced aggfunc=lambda x: x.map({'Y':1,'N':0}).mean()) without explaining it. Intuitively I know you are coding Y as 1 and N as 0 and taking mean of each but you still need to explain what is lambda x: x.map . . . .
There seems to be a bit of confusion, when you plot histogram. Histogram, by definition, is a plot of occurrence frequency of some variable. So, when you do manipulation with ApplicantIncome, transforming to a TotalIncome by adding CoapplicantIncome, the outcome does not affect the histogram of LoanAmount, because the outcome of this manipulation does not change the occurrence frequency or the values of LoanAmount. If you compare both of your plots, they will look exactly the same for mentioned above reason. So, it will be, probably, better to correct this part of the article.
Thanks
Hi Kunal - first off thanks for this informative tutorial. Great stuff. Unfortunately I'm unable to download the dataset - I need to be signed up on AV, and I get an invalid request on signup. Thank you again for this material.
Worked when I tried again after a few hours. Nevermind!
Hi Kunal, Dont you give us access to the data set any more? I am reading your tutorial and want to repeat your steps for data analysis! Thanks, Dorinel
when running this code : table = df.pivot_table(values='LoanAmount', index='Self_Employed' ,columns='Education', aggfunc=np.median) # Define function to return value of this pivot_table def fage(x): return table.loc[x['Self_Employed'],x['Education']] # Replace missing values df['LoanAmount'].fillna(df[df['LoanAmount'].isnull()].apply(fage, axis=1), inplace=True) i am getting this error: KeyError: ('the label [Graduate] is not in the [index]', u'occurred at index 0') Any ideas? Thanks In Advance
Thanks for this. Is there a way to get access to the dataset that was used for this? seems like it became unavailable from March 7!
Really great and would start following - I am a new entry to the data analysis stream
Hi Kunal, I have trying to get some validations in python for logistic regression as available for SAS, like Area Under Curve, Concordant, Discordant and Tied pairs, Ginni Value etc.. But I am unable to find it through google, what ever I was able to find was very confusing. Can you please help me with this? Regards, Harneet.
Very well written tutorial to learn data science with python.
Really awesome Kunal Jain, I appreciate your work....
Hello, very good article. I just stumbled upon one piece of code where I am not quite sure if I just don' interpret the arguments well, or whether there is truely a mistake in your code. It is the following: metrics.accuracy_score(predictions,data[outcome]) Isn't "predictions" the true predictions, which should be placed as the argument "y_pred" of the accuracy_score method, and "data[outcome]" are the real values which should be associated with the argument "y_true"? If that is so, then I think the order of passing the arguments is wrong, because the method is defined as following (according to doc): confusion_matrix(y_true, y_pred[, labels]) --> that means y_true comes as 1st argument. You have it the other way arround. or doesn't make it a difference at all? Anyways. Best regards, Peter
Hi! And thank you very much for your tutorial Unfortunately there is no way to find the .csv file for the loan prediction problem in https://datahack.analyticsvidhya.com/contest/practice-problem-loan-prediction-iii/
Hello, Thank you for the tutorial. But as already mentioned by Nicola, there is no way to download the DataSet. Could you please check it? Thanks
The amount of effort you guys put into these article is a true inspiration for folks like me to learn! Thanks for all this!
Great one. Thank you. When I type in "df.describe() " , it works, but it gives me a warning information : "user\AppData\Local\Continuum\Anaconda3\lib\site-packages\numpy\lib\function_base.py:3834: RuntimeWarning: Invalid value encountered in percentile RuntimeWarning) " What is it means? Secondly, when I running "df['ApplicantIncome'].hist(bins=50)" It tells me "", so I can not see the chart. Anyone can helps? Thank you.