Dempsey - Python business intelligence cookbook leverage the computational power of Python with more than 60 recipes that arm you with the required skills to make informed business decisions

Robert Dempsey is a tested leader and technology professional who specializes in delivering solutions and products to solve tough business challenges. His experience of forming and leading agile teams, combined with more than 16 years of technology experience, enables him to solve complex problems while always keeping the bottom line in mind.

Robert has founded and built three start-ups in tech and marketing, developed and sold two online applications, consulted for Fortune 500 and Inc. 500 companies, and has spoken nationally and internationally on software development and agile project management.

He's the founder of Data Wranglers DC, a group that is dedicated to improving the craft of data engineering, as well as a board member of Data Community DC.

In addition to spending time with his growing family, Robert geeks out on Raspberry Pi, Arduinos, and automating more of his life through hardware and software.

Find him on his website at http://robertwdempsey.com.

I would like to thank my family for giving me the mornings, nights, and weekends to write this book. Without their love and support everything would be a lot harder. I'd also like to thank the creators of Pandas, scikit-learn, matplotlib, and all the excellent Python tools that allow us to do all that we do with data and have fun at the same time. Finally, I'd like to thank the team at Packt for giving me a platform for this book, and you for purchasing it.

Utsav Singh holds a BTech from Uttar Pradesh Technical University and currently works as a senior software engineer at MAQ Software. He is a Microsoft certified Business Intelligence developer, and he has also worked on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. He loves writing reusable, scalable, clean, and optimized code. He believes in developing software that keeps everyone happyprogrammers, clients, and end users.

He is experienced in AWS, Python, Django, Shell scripting, MySQL, SQL Server, and C#. With help from these technologies and extensive experience in business intelligence, he has been designing and automating terabyte-scale data marts and warehouses for the last three years.

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Preface

Data! Everyone is surrounded by it, but few know how to truly exploit it. For those who do, glory awaits!

Okay, so that's a little dramatic; however, being able to turn raw data into actionable information is a goal that every organization is working to achieve. This book helps you achieve it.

Making sense of data isn't some esoteric art requiring multiple degreesit's a matter of knowing the recipes to take your data through each stage of the process. It all starts with asking an interesting question.

My mission is that, by the end of this book, you will be equipped to apply Python to business intelligence taskspreparing, exploring, analyzing, visualizing, and reportingin order to make more informed business decisions using the data at hand.

Prepare for an awesome read, my friend!

A little context first. The code in this book is developed on Mac OS X 10.11.1, using Python 3.4.3, IPython 4.0.0, matplotlib 1.4.3, NumPy 1.9.1, scikit-learn 0.16.1, and Pandas 0.16.2in other words, the latest or near-latest versions at the time of publishing.

What this book covers

, Getting Set Up to Gain Business Intelligence , covers a set of installation recipes and advice on how to install the required Python packages and libraries as well as MongoDB.

, Making Your Data All It Can Be , provides recipes to prepare data for analysis, including importing the data into MongoDB, cleaning the data, and standardizing it.

, Learning What Your Data Truly Holds , shows you how to explore your data by creating a Pandas DataFrame from a MongoDB query, creating a data quality report, generating summary statistics, and creating charts.

, Performing Data Analysis for Non Data Analysts , provides recipes to perform statistical and predictive analysis on your data.

, Building a Business Intelligence Dashboard Quickly , builds on everything that you've learned and shows you how to generate reports in Excel, and build web-based business intelligence dashboards.