Python Data Science Essentials
Second Edition
Become an efficient data science practitioner by understanding Python's key concepts
Alberto Boschetti
Luca Massaron
BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI
Python Data Science Essentials
Second Edition
Copyright 2016 Packt Publishing
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First published: April 2015
Second edition: October 2016
Production reference: 1211016
Published by Packt Publishing Ltd.
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ISBN 978-1-78646-213-8
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Credits
Authors Alberto Boschetti Luca Massaron | Copy Editor Vikrant Phadke |
Reviewer Zacharias Voulgaris | Project Coordinator Nidhi Joshi |
Commissioning Editor Veena Pagare | Proofreader Safis Editing |
Acquisition Editor Namrata Patil | Indexer Aishwarya Gangawane |
ContentDevelopmentEditor Mayur Pawanikar | Graphics Disha Haria |
Technical Editor Vivek Arora | Production Coordinator Arvindkumar Gupta |
About the Authors
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 ranging from natural language processing (NLP), behavioral analysis, and machine learning to distributed processing. He is very passionate about his job and always tries to stay updated about the latest developments in data science technologies, attending meet-ups, conferences, and other events.
I would like to thank my family, my friends, and my colleagues. Also, a big thanks to the open source community.
Luca Massaron is a data scientist and marketing research director specializing in multivariate statistical analysis, machine learning, and customer insight, with over a decade of experience of 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 ten Kaggler, he has always been very passionate about every aspect of data and its analysis, and also about demonstrating the potential of data-driven knowledge discovery to both experts and non-experts. Favoring simplicity over unnecessary sophistication, Luca believes that a lot can be achieved in data science just by doing the essentials.
To Yukiko and Amelia, for their loving patience. "Roads go ever ever on, under cloud and under star, yet feet that wandering have gone turn at last to home afar".
About the Reviewer
Zacharias Voulgaris is a data scientist and technical author specializing in data science books. He has an engineering and management background, with post-graduate studies in information systems and machine learning. Zacharias has worked as a research fellow at Georgia Tech, investigating and applying machine learning technologies to real-world problems, as an SEO manager in an e-marketing company in Europe, as a program manager in Microsoft, and as a data scientist at US Bank and at G2 Web Services.
Dr. Voulgaris has also authored technical books, the most notable of which is Data Scientist - the definitive guide to becoming a data scientist (Technics Publications), and his newest book, Julia for Data Science (Technics Publications), was released during the summer of 2016. He has also written a number of data-science-related articles on blogs and participates in various data science/machine learning meetup groups. Finally, he has provided technical editorial aid in the book Python Data Science Essentials (Packt), by the same authors as this book.
I would very much like to express my gratitude to the authors of the book for giving me the opportunity to contribute to this project. Also, I'd like to thank Bastiaan Sjardin for introducing me to them and to the world of technical editing. It's been a privilege working with all of you.
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Preface
"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
Laozi (604 BC - 531 BC)
Data science is a relatively new knowledge domain that requires the successful integration of linear algebra, statistical modeling, visualization, computational linguistics, graph analysis, machine learning, business intelligence, and data storage and retrieval.
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